How Not to Make a Human: Pets, Feral Children, Worms, Sky Burial, Oysters 1517905273, 9781517905279

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Introduction
ONE: Pets
TWO: Isolated and Feral Children
THREE: Food for Worms
FOUR: Food for Birds
FIVE: Oysters
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Citation preview

How Not to Make a Human

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How Not to Make a Human Pets, Feral Children, Worms, Sky Burial, Oysters

[ Karl Steel ]

U n i v e r s i t y o f M i n n e s o ta P r e s s Minneapolis • London

Copyright 2019 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Steel, Karl, author. Title: How not to make a human : pets, feral children, worms, sky burial, oysters / Karl Steel. Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019009073 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0526-2 (hc) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0527-9 (pb) Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. | Human–animal relationships in literature. | Animals in literature. | Human beings in literature. Classification: LCC PN682.A57 S73 2019 (print) | LCC PN682.A57 (ebook) | DDC 808.009/362—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009073

UMP BmB 2019

[ To a l l m y f rie n d s ]

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Contents

Introduction  1

o n e Pets  17



t w o Isolated and Feral Children   41



t h r e e Food for Worms   75



f o u r Food for Birds   111



f i v e Oysters  135

Acknowledgments  165 Notes  169 Bibliography  207 Index  247

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Introduction Halfway through Marie de France’s twelfth-­century Bisclavret, its eponymous werewolf hero is on the run. Trapped in his lupine form by his frightened wife, he survives in the forest by stealing food, until the king’s dogs and hunters find him and sport with him. Just as he is about to be torn to pieces, he runs toward the king and begs his mercy (vers lui curut querre merci; 146) by taking hold of his stirrup and kissing his leg and foot (il l’aveit pris par sun estrié, / la jambe li baise e le pié; 147–­48).1 In his terror (grant poür; 149), the king scarcely knows what to do. He orders his men and their pack to stand down and to “look at this marvel” (iceste merveille esguardez; 152). Look, commands the king, at “how this beast humbles itself ” (cum ceste beste s’umilie; 153), at how “it has human intelligence” (ele a sen d’ume; 154): after all, “taking hold of ” rather than biting, “kissing” rather than licking—­these gestures could belong to none but a human animal. When the king finally concludes that “this beast has understanding and intelligence” (ceste beste a entente e sen; 157), Bis­ clavret joins the king’s retinue and becomes his intimate companion, for when he at last returns to his human form, he does so alone, on the king’s own bed, but not before he surprises his wife when she visits the king’s court, and bites her nose off. She is driven defaced into exile, while Bisclavret remains an honored member of the king’s court. Marie and her contemporaries inaugurated an interest in sympathetic, intelligent werewolves that has lasted well past the end of the Middle Ages.2 In Gerald of Wales’s History and Topography of Ireland, werewolves ask a priest to administer last rites;3 in Melion, another wages a guerrilla 1

2   Introduction

campaign against his treacherous wife to regain his stolen heritage;4 in William of Palerne, another allies with two noble youths to secure justice from a wicked stepmother.5 Each of these other werewolf stories insists on the human core of their animals: peeling back the fur, in Gerald’s case, reveals the face of a sickly old woman;6 in Arthur and Gorlagon, an ineptly recited curse transforms a man into a wolf, but leaves intact his intelligence;7 or in Melion, the story simply asserts that “even though he was a wolf / he retained the reason and memory [sens et memoire] of a man.”8 Another story, from the massive fourteenth-­century romance Perceforest, about a man turned into a bear, and clearly based on Bis­ clavret, stresses that its unfortunate knight “had far more intelligence than if he’d been a real bear.”9 Narrative tics like these attest to a desire to ensure that humans stay human, and animals animal, so that any apparent category play is nothing more than a bit of toying. In these other stories, reason is an exclusively human possession, and we should never forget that. Not so for Bisclavret: the king slides from identifying Bisclav­ ret as a marvel, as a beast, as a beast with human intelligence, and then, finally, as a beast with intelligence, whatever that could be. And there he rests. Bisclavret can take a human form, or a lupine one, but whatever his form, he has intelligence too. Put this way, Marie’s narrative wager might be understood as: What if nonhumans could have intelligence too? And although that question is complicated—­Bisclavret’s intelligence is not necessarily a human intelli­ gence—­the question still undervalues the complexity of Marie’s treatment of beastly or any intelligence, because the king’s judgment might not be right in any simple way. Bisclavret’s “intelligence” may just be the expression of needs difficult to distinguish from those that possess any living thing, human or otherwise. He uses noble gestures of submission, certainly, but to keep himself alive: and submission, as Peggy McCracken observes in a book on animals and sovereignty, is just as much a canine as a human habit.10 In the tale’s conclusion, when he attacks his estranged wife’s lover and, soon thereafter, tears off his wife’s nose, he acts indeterminately as either a spurned, abusive husband, inflicting a recognized punishment for adultery, or as a savage beast—­even though medieval

Introduction    3

animal lore held that wolves never ate human faces, because of their fear of us.11 Bisclavret does what he does not necessarily because of reason, which is to say, not necessarily because of concerns that are abstract, objective, and concerned with generalizable laws. Free choice of the will hardly seems to be the engine of the defense of one’s life, or the enraged rectification of injustice: his actions feel reflexive. It is not, however, that Bisclavret is really an animal, but that what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen memorably terms the “undifferentiated concurrency”12 of Marie’s story stymies any attempt to distill any pure human intelligence, or a purely animal irrationality, from the actions of “ceste beste” identified as having “entente e sen.”13 What ultimately matters to Bisclavret is an interspecies homosocial aristocratic loyalty, at the expense of one unfortunately married woman;14 what matters is less that Bisclavret has intelligence than that his actions receive royal legitimization. By the tale’s end, human difference comes to register only as a slight and fading ripple in its narrative current. Any contemporary theologian would be scandalized. Such scandals are the subject of How Not to Make a Human, which aims to explore what is left out of most discussions of medieval treatments of the distinction between humans and animals. From the standpoint of professional, scholarly texts running through the entirety of the Middle Ages, the difference between having human intelligence and a beast having intelligence is that between a pleonasm and an impossibility: for Augustine, for Aquinas, for a host of other thinkers, to be human at all is to be a mortal body conjoined with an immortal, rational soul, and to be a beast is to be precisely that form of life barred from reason and delivered over to everlasting, meaningless death.15 Nothing could be more important than the difference between rational humanity and irrational animality, for without reason, there could be no free will, and without free will, there could be no moral culpability: lose human dif­ ference, and the whole edifice of divine justice collapses. Christ would have sacrificed himself for nothing. Or for wolves too, which would be an absurdity. Yet these old means of making divisions are hardly only a relic of medieval theology. When Vinciane Despret describes a governing model

4   Introduction

of modern ethology as one in which the nonhuman animal is a “biological machine at the whim of uncontrollable laws . . . whose motivations can be mapped like a quasi-­autonomous plumbing system,”16 she could just as well be describing the insistence in medieval professional thinking on the impossibility of any nonhuman animal ever making a real choice. Without any fear of contradiction, the thirteenth-­century political theorist Marsilius of Padua affirms that “man alone among the animals is said to have ownership or control of his acts.”17 Albert the Great insists that although spiders spin and swallows build nests, neither is truly a weaver or carpenter, neither an artisan, because all members of the species build in exactly the same way: lacking reason, animals can act only from nature, not from art.18 And when Marx writes that “man can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion, or anything else you like,”19 his assertion reads like nothing so much as a slight revision to Augustine of Hippo’s early fifth-­century assertion that humans surpass “brute beasts” by “his reason or mind or intelligence or whatever we wish to call it.”20 Without claiming any direct lines of inheritance, I feel comfortable intimating that the standard set of modern humanist beliefs about human difference are an automatic, even instinctual, repetition of ideas promulgated and refined in the thought of the Middle Ages. Or at least in the systematic thought of the Middle Ages: outside systematic thought, a vast array of other material teemed. How Not to Make a Human aims to give nonsystematic animal thinking the attention it deserves without reducing it to a homogeneous system, and without elevating the merely recherché into false positions of central importance: nothing How Not to Make a Human discusses was all that obscure in its time. Bisclavret, for one, merits attention. In the middle as in the modern ages, it has an audience: two manuscript copies (one complete) of Marie’s own text survive, twice as many as, for example, Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Bisclavret was itself adapted into the far more misogynist Biclarel and also translated in the thirteenth-­century Norwegian Strengleikar,21 extant in one manuscript and then again, as part of the Icelandic Tiódéls Saga, preserved in an astonishing twenty-­four

Introduction    5

manuscripts, the earliest dating to 1600: here, the wife, a murderer, is far crueler than Marie’s original, and the hero successively transforms into a wolf, a bear, and then, finally, a polar bear.22 And in our present day, few undergraduate surveys of pre-­Romantic European literature would be complete without at least one of Marie’s tales. Yet the story’s sym­ pathetic, beastly intelligence renders it virtually unusable if it is meant to represent the most common features of “medieval literature”: undergraduates, and not only undergraduates, might come away from it mistakenly certain that medieval thought was generally disanthropocentric and otherwise free-­roving when it came to human and animal difference. Given the master codes of medieval humanity, produced as they were in university settings, inculcated in religious doctrine, themselves at times defended by sword and fire and inquisition, to what degree can we claim that Bisclavret is a medieval work? We can, if our aim is describing possibilities, rather than providing only a clear map of the intellectual thruways of any given era. By way of comparison, I offer up two moments from Enlightenment French thought, the former quite familiar, repeatedly upheld as a key moment in the transition to modern humanism, and the other almost entirely forgotten. The first comes from Nicholas Fontaine’s early eighteenth-­century Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Port-­Royal. Hundreds of scholars have cited one passage from this book, from what seems to have become the standard translation, dating back to its appearance in Tom Regan’s 1982 All That Dwell Herein, a foundational animal rights text, who in turn seems to have plucked it from Loren C. Eiseley’s 1960 The Firma­ ment of Time.23 Nicholas Fontaine recalls that Antoine Arnaud, le grand, held to Descartes’s opinions on the question of animals. When he relaxed among his friends, Arnaud often asserted that animals were nothing other than automata, little wind-­up machines, and that consequently it was nothing to beat a dog, or to nail it to a board and cut it open to examine its circulation, because its cries were little more than the creaking of a displaced spring. And with that horror, scholars frighten us into recognizing that our modern regime of factory farming, animal experimentation, and indifferent instrumentalization of nonhuman life is an

6   Introduction

era that broke with something better. Things had once been less bad for animals, and for humans too, and they might be so again, so long as we confess to the guilt bequeathed to us by modernity. But to my knowledge literally no modern animal rights writer cites the following story, also from Fontaine’s Mémoires, and like the other also about Antoine Arnaud: But can I forget the pleasant conversation when this good lord closed the mouth of Monsieur Arnaud, as learned as he was? They were speaking of Descartes’ philosophy, who was then the subject of everyone’s conversation. Monsieur Arnaud, a polymath, had joined with Descartes’ system on the question of animals, holding that they were nothing more than clocks, and that when they cried out, it was nothing more than clockwork making noise. Monsieur de Liancourt [Duke Roger du Plessis] said to him, “Down there [in the kitchen] I have two dogs who turn the spit, each on his own day. One of the dogs, who was less than eager to do it, hid himself when they were going to put him to it, and they resorted to his companion [another dog] to turn the spit instead of him. The companion cried out and signaled with its tail that he should be followed. He turned up the other in the attic and reprimanded him fiercely. Are these clocks?” he said, which Monsieur Arnaud found so amusing than he could do nothing else but laugh at it. [Mais puis-­je oublier le plaisant entretien, où ce bon Seigneur ferma la bouche à M. Arnaud, tout savant qu’il étoit? On parloit de la philosophie de M. Descartes, qui étoit alors l’entretien de toutes les compagnies. M. Arnaud qui avoit un esprit universel & qui étoit entré dans le sistême de Descartes sur les bêtes, soutenoit que ce n’étoient que des horloges, et que quand elles crioient ce n’étoit qu’une roue d’horloge qui faisoit du bruit. M. de Liancourt lui dit: “J’ai là bas deux chiens qui tournent la broche chacun leur jour. L’un s’en trouvant embarrassé se cacha lorsqu’on l’alloit prendre, et on eut recours à son camarade pour tourner au lieu de lui. Le camarade cria, et fit signe de sa queue qu’on le suivît. Il alla dénicher l’autre dans le grenier et le houspilla. Sont-­ce là des horloges?” dit-­il, à M. Arnaud qui trouva cela si plaisant, qu’il ne put faire autre chose que d’en rire.24]

Introduction    7

The ironies are almost too obvious to describe: though the Duke kept his dogs as literal machines, he knew them to have a sense of justice; though Arnaud beat and crucified his dogs, though he used them to study life itself—­or to liberate “life,” whatever that is, from the body—­he con­ sidered them, at best, mechanical puzzles to be solved. Even here, under Descartes, human confidence could go awry, with only a tickled, nervous, or uncertain laughter where we might expect to find cold reason. The mistake would be to take Arnaud’s laughter or the Duke’s proof as a vestige of an earlier zootopic dispensation, or even to take it as anticipating the so-­called modern rise of house pets, the proliferation of eulogies for animals and animal biographies, and so on. Antoine Arnaud and Roger du Plessis lived in the same, heterogeneous era, representing competing discourses; the former belonged to the faction that gave us modern science, and the latter to what we might hopefully call a science-­ to-­come. A discourse powerful and influential enough to represent an era and some of those that followed should not be mistaken for the only story an era can offer us. Far more familiar writing on animals furnishes similar complexity. In Genesis’s first creation account, God creates various creatures according to their kind and particular domains, and then forms humankind, uniquely, in his own image and grants them dominion over other animals, twice, in Genesis 1:26 and 1:28. In Genesis’s second creation story, beginning at 2:4, God creates Adam to tend to the plants he first created, and then tries to cure his loneliness by providing him with living things “like unto himself ” (2:18), “all the beasts of the earth, and all the fowls of the air” (2:19). Though Adam knows his new companions well enough to name them, God’s experiment still fails: Adam, malcontent, wants something even more familiar. Exegetes wondered how animals had proved unsuitable, and what else could have gone wrong, as Adam, when he first regards Eve, declares: “This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man” (2:23). The point of exegetical contention was the “this now”: some imagined that God might have provided a previous, unsatisfactory Eve, while the eleventh-­century scholar Rashi outraged his successors

8   Introduction

by explaining that “this now” meant that “Adam mated with (she-­ba’ adam) every [species of] domesticated animal (behemah) and wild animal (ḥayah) but his appetite was not assuaged (lo’ nitkarerah da’ato) by them.”25 Whatever else Genesis’s second creation story is, and whatever our legitimate objections to the possibility of Edenic bestiality, it must be recognized as a creation account whose fundamental assumptions of human and animal relations and distinctions differ radically from that of the first, just as these two accounts differ in turn from the chaoskampf of the Bible’s third creation story, in Psalms 73/74:12–­17, where we find verses like these: “Thou by thy strength didst make the sea firm: thou didst crush the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou hast broken the heads of the dragon: thou hast given him to be meat for the people of the Ethiopians,” and then, more familiarly, “Thine is the day, and thine is the night: thou hast made the morning light and the sun.” One story, Genesis 1, concerns separation and dominion, the one beginning in Genesis 2, thriving and cohabitation and loneliness, and the third, from the Psalms, a great oceanic conflict out of whose victory God made our world’s coherence. Animals come first, or Adam does, or perhaps “the dragons in the waters” do. Whatever the organizing efforts of the Bible’s ancient editors, and whatever the reception of the Bible since, none of these stories have clear priority, and none is the clear endpoint, because all three, being stories of origins, could have stood equally well at the Bible’s beginning. The complicated relationship of Bisclavret to the main lines of medieval professional doctrine, or Roger du Plessis to Descartes, or Genesis 2 to Genesis 1 to Psalms 73, should not be understood as temporal, as if one pure system of thought gave way to other. The point is not that Bisclavret is ahead of its time, or that, at least on the question of non­ human life, medieval people were Descartes avant la lettre. Nor, as delightful as it may be to claim Descartes as premodern, and therefore medieval(!), none of us, including medievalists, should make strong claims of temporal transformation until we have thoroughly mapped the heterogeneity of a given moment or even individual. Bisclavret was of its time, and so too were Marie’s university contemporaries. These differing

Introduction    9

perspectives could therefore better be understood not as temporal but as territorial divisions, describing how people draw borders around themselves and every other thing. Some are concerned with human/animal differences, and others with other differences. Some represent a set of various simultaneously existing territories, some of which we might call intellectual superpowers—­many medieval university texts survive in literally hundreds of manuscripts—­but for all that, the rest of their balkanized world existed at the same time.26 In this balkanized world, we might find, in addition to Marie’s Bis­ clavret, works like the thirteenth-­century old Norse King’s Mirror, which draws on Irish writing and storytelling to imagine the fate of men driven mad by battle—­they flee into the woods, where they grow feathers and “run along the trees almost as swiftly as monkeys or squirrels”27—­or Thomas of Cantimpré’s thirteenth-­century Life of Christina Mirabilis (the Astonishing), from what is now Sint-­Truiden in modern-­day Belgium: after dying briefly, and then being restored to life, Christina now has the corporeal freedom of the resurrection body, but in the mutable, present world. At one point she collapses her limbs “together into a ball as if they were hot wax” so that “all that could be perceived of her was a round mass,” and then, once finished with her “spiritual inebriation,” she returned to her proper form, “like a hedgehog” unrolling itself.28 Some of this material we might simply call “folkloric,” a representation of pre-­Christian beliefs; some other material—­like the peasants who reverenced Guinefort, the Holy Greyhound—­we might simply call a local culture, not quite yet ironed out into orthodoxy; and some of this material, like Thomas of Cantimpré’s Life of Christina, emerges from the very centers of professionally trained Christianity. Raymond Williams’s ideas regarding dominant, residual, and emergent cultures gets us some way toward thinking about cultural heterogeneity, but my hunch is that its tendency to ask us to think sequentially, in relatively homogeneous confections of time and culture, obscures the fascinating incoherencies of medieval approaches to human difference. A simplistic conceptual sequence would hold that animals come first, then humans, and then posthumans. The final, posthuman element might

10   Introduction

be either a technological abandonment of both animality and humanity, in which brute matter, and even mortality and individuality, are sloughed off as the human uploads itself into a higher, technological existence. Alternately, the final, posthuman element can be a synthesis that finally recognizes the animal characteristics of even the traits humans claim as uniquely theirs: language, reason, even the soul, as the old certainties of humanism give way before the scientific onslaught of evolutionary genetics and disanthropocentric, nonprejudicial ethology. In either case, however, what is normally presumed is the sequence, with true post­ humanism requiring the intellectual freedom and atheism of the present. By contrast, recognizing the contradictions and complexity of the “normative humanity” of the Middle Ages prevents modern critics from mistakenly thinking that the category of the human had ever functioned perfectly.29 Even the most mainstream medieval thinkers, in their attempts to separate humans from all other animals, recognized that claims to human reason rested on a shaky foundation. To the degree that the category of the human jealousy guards its privileges, especially immaterial privileges like the claim to an immortal soul and the unique possession of language and free will, it has always been in crisis: no category ever works perfectly. But a not inconsiderable amount of medieval textuality, even amid such category crises, was more or less indifferent to the orthodox chore of defending an absolute human difference. Posthumanism need not await some coming technocultural shift; it simply requires more careful reading of the material we already have. The chapters of How Not to Make a Human follow a trajectory from minimal challenges to human particularity to a final wriggling free from the presumption that agency, free will, and rationality are the defining characteristics of the human experience. My first chapter, on pets, illustrates interspecies emotional bonds in their promise, danger, and pathology. It begins with how cats draw affectionate attention from even their most suspicious critics; next, it considers the widespread “Canis” or “Guinefort” legend, in which a knight goes on pilgrimage or even kills himself because he has unjustly killed his dog; and finally it studies Chaucer’s Prioress, whose keeping of pets, even in recent criticism, has

Introduction    11

been derided as a symptom of her thwarted motherhood or as otherwise pathetic. Rather than normalizing her by, for example, historicizing monastic pet-­keeping, I will explore the Prioress’s misdirected love of (certain) animals as both a node in her anti-­Semitism and a queer refusal to go along with the human community. In an approach indebted to feminist care ethics, my second chapter demonstrates that stories of isolated and feral children are less about a foundational extrajudicial masculine power than they are about the need for community, of whatever sort. First, I consider the famous language-­ deprivation experiment, treating examples from Herodotus through to early modern retellings of a similar experiment supposedly conducted at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar. The chapter next engages with stories of “feral founders” like Romulus and Remus to argue that they should be understood not as stories of sovereignty but as stories of “feral foundlings,” for in all of them the abandoned human children thrive only because they are cared for. I finally consider the fourteenth-­ century wolf child of Hesse, whose story belongs to the point when old stories of heroic feral founders began to become modernity’s familiar stories of wretched feral children. As I observe, the brief discussion of him in a fourteenth-­century chronicle from Germany hints that he may have joined his pack in eating human flesh. Though the story presents an alternate model of being human, and a surprising degree of sympathy for the melancholic adult the boy becomes, it nonetheless does not flinch from picturing what might be required to become a companion of wolves. My third chapter, “Food for Worms,” recuperates medieval death art for ecocritical thinking. Although death art has been understood primarily as driven by moral, ascetic, and antifeminist concerns, its interest in the material edibility of the human body might be recuperated if it is read ecologically. I focus at length on the Middle English “Disputation between the Body and Worms,” a poetic dream conversation between a woman’s corpse and a pack of moralizing, hungry vermin. I engage with the poem in four ways: as a study of the weird modes of sexualized identification between dreamer and putrefying flesh; as a consideration of the challenge worms pose to the “unsubstitutible singularity” at the

12   Introduction

heart of main currents of critical animal theory; as a rehabilitation of spontaneous generation to challenge metaphors of life and vitality; and finally, as a consideration of how the poem’s call for “friendship” between corpse and worms might be taken as a call to accept the edibility of what we believe to be our own bodies. “Food for Birds,” my fourth chapter, begins by focusing on the clas­ sical and medieval interest of inhumation cultures in the “sky burial”—­ the ritual exposure of human corpses to be eaten by birds—­as practiced by Iranian Zoroastrians and, later, by Tibetan Buddhists. Writers from Herodotus on took a variety of stances, but many simply took an interest, without condemnation. Later medieval material ultimately stems from reports from Franciscan missionaries in central Asia and the transmission of ethnographic material into the enormously widespread Book of John Mandeville. The practical, unhorrified attention to differing customs anticipates contemporary attempts to concoct ecologically sound burial practices, while the medieval material, ultimately concerned with the culture of birds, challenges the tendency in modern writing to represent “sky burial” as a return to “natural balance.” Extending the pre­ vious chapter’s interest in the edibility of humans, chapter 4 ultimately concerns human edibility as a negotiation or accommodation with a host of interested parties, irreducible to any facile split between culture and nature. My final chapter considers the oyster, which, from Plato through at least the eighteenth-­century French Enlightenment encyclopedia, incarnated animal life at its most helpless. Philippe de Thaon and Robert Grosseteste thought of oysters as basically rocks, generated spontaneously (rather than through deliberate mating) by the action of the sun upon the waters. The fourteenth-­century encyclopedist John Trevisa is more typical of the tradition in calling oysters the “lowest in animal kind, surpassing but little the highest form of life of trees and plants,” unable to move, and with no sense but touch. Ficino’s fifteenth-­century commentaries on Plato called the life of the oyster one of “pure pleasure” and the form of life that was “closest to death,” while the French encyclopedists Diderot and d’Alembert thought that a human stripped of

Introduction    13

everything but life would effectively be an oyster. Thinking with oysters counters the emphasis on “agency” that is so typical of the last decade’s work in posthumanist philosophy and literary criticism, while also generating an alternate history of the key critical concept of “bare life.” Through identifying with the oyster, so helpless and senseless, we might recognize how little a role agency plays in most of our lives. For as even Descartes observed, our existence is mostly unwilled. To return to Bisclavret: Marie’s story is definitively medieval, but not medieval in the expected ways, if we judge “medieval” on the basis of its most influential, widespread texts and ideas. Her story scurries free of these strictures. That recognition helps keep our interpretation free from the constraints of any one medieval systematic thought, or indeed any other, including the assumptions of modern humanism. A thoroughgoing posthumanist interpretation of Marie’s work, or indeed any work like this, should stop short whenever we think we know what the human or the animal might be, or how or if they relate to each other. Most of all, we ought to avoid interpreting Bisclavret as saying something about the “beast within”: the modern cliché is not a medieval one, and, at any rate, the idea that something primitive lurks in humans, that this primitive element is animal, that this element is violent, and that this violent, animal element is somehow “truer” than our veneer of humanity—­such beliefs, more than a little redolent of the gendered clichés of popular evolutionary psychology, are an invitation to depoliticized interpretations of the violence of the court and violence against women. They are also an invitation to read Bisclavret as if violence is where we would find the story’s truth. Of course Bisclavret is violent: Marie begins by observing that werewolves eat people, and although Marie quickly tells us, too, that she plans to tell another kind of story, she leaves us wondering just what, exactly, Bisclavret eats during his time in the forest. Bisclavret’s noseless wife is tortured until she confesses, and then driven away, while Bisclavret, triumphant, enjoys the pleasures of the king’s company. But the story is not violent because it says something about the indelibly animal truth of sovereignty, or masculinity, or even humanity—­or, for that matter, the Middle Ages, which, being “brutal,” “savage,” or “ferocious” (all

14   Introduction

from Latin words for wildness and animals), somehow represents something awful lurking in all of us. Good scholars should work to undo the self-­serving cliché of “medieval brutality,” which pollutes the medieval with the animal and vice versa, thus animalizing an entire era and supposedly “backward” regions or peoples, held to have not yet “evolved” out of the Middle Ages.30 Bisclavret is not violent because it belongs to animality or the Middle Ages, but because Bisclavret’s wife is frightened when she discovers what she has married; and it is violent, too, because the king aligns himself with his lupine companion, as he would align himself with any nobleman, against the claims of a woman; and it is violent because all categories rely on exclusions, and exclusions strike back when threatened, particularly when the exclusions have the force of a king behind them. We need a method subtle enough to respond to these elements without snapping them into something all too familiar: Marie’s lai asks us to wonder what intelligence might be, and what it is for; what we ought to do about anthropophagy; how love (in this case, of a wolf) chooses some things at the expense of others (a woman); and perhaps most of all, about the awful situation of women when they come up against what Sara Ahmed calls mandated “happiness scripts,” that of being “willing and able to express happiness in proximity to the right things,”31 including, in this case, a husband whose being is also lupine and perhaps also anthropophagic. We also need a method subtle enough to respond to the companionship between king and wolf without condemning it out of hand, because such condemnations are a temptation toward believing in our own innocence or the innocence of any other love. The story is about violence, but other things too. How Not to Make a Human has as one of its goals a reorientation of critical animal studies from the certainty that the way to philosophical and ethical truth is through the study of violence. Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am famously treats Jeremy Bentham’s argument that the most important question about nonhuman animals is not whether they can speak or have reason, but whether they can suffer. With Bentham’s new formulation, Derrida claims, everything changes,

Introduction    15

as philosophical attention can be shifted away from capacities—­the presence or absence of language, for example—­and toward the “nonpower at the heart of power,” namely, the inability to avoid suffering, common to all sentient things, human or animal. By shifting attention, Derrida aims at what he calls “the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life” (la façon la plus radicale de penser la finitude que nous partageons avec les animaux, la mortalité qui appartient à la finitude même de la vie).32 Derrida discovers the most intense form of the question, its beginning (the radical, from the Latin radix, root) and after (the finitude, from the Latin finis, a close or conclusion) in suffering. But recalling Herbert Marcuse’s short classic of antifascist writing, his “Ideology of Death,” should make us suspicious about any elevation of “a brute biological fact . . . into an existential privilege”:33 death, suffering, or other unpleasant states need not be upheld as the truth of life. Likewise, recalling Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty should guide us away from the “Messianic approach to art-­making” that holds that revelations of violence are key to shaking us out of our complacency.34 With Marcuse and Nelson in mind, we might do better to begin our analysis with other forms of nonpower, like that of the wolf that wants to stay alive, as well as the king’s admiration, and the king’s captivation at his wonder over his new companion, whom he prefers to more familiar visitors to his court: Derrida no doubt would support such a project of letting analysis tumble resolutely into undecidable situations like these, all of which undo our illusions of sovereignty. Bisclavret is admittedly a perverse choice of a text to use for a reading for forces other than violence, sovereignty, and domination. I chose it for that very reason, because its various strange social worlds and feelings also challenge us to concoct a non-­naive engagement with care and wonder and community, with tools not so automatically fitted to weary condemnation and pessimistic certainties. Let’s experiment by trying another way.

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[ one] Pets The Ancrene Riwle, an early thirteenth-­century guide for female religious recluses, famously allows its “dear sisters . . . no animal except a single cat,” unless “need drives you and your director advises it.”1 Less famous may be the next warning, about the trouble likely to follow if the recluse also keeps a cow: for one, the recluse would have to supervise a herdsman, and if the cow wandered off, she might have to pay fines to the “hei-­ward,” the local official responsible for fences and property lines. Better to avoid making herself a scandal, for “it is a disgusting thing, Christ knows, when people in town can complain about anything concerning a recluse.” The guide rounds off these brief proscriptions with one last caution: if recluses must have an animal, “see that . . . their thought is in no way fastened on it.” For recluses should “have no thing that draws their heart outwards.” Need can take many forms, from practical requirements to the often more difficult matter of managing the needs of one’s heart. It is easy to imagine the recluse’s “meistre” admitting that a cat might be just the thing to keep a cell free of mice; easy too to imagine her superior recognizing that the recluse could gain some financial independence by keeping a cow. I’m struck, however, by the associative chain that slides from cow to cat. Though the guide presumably considers both animals prac­ tical, one still wonders why it allows the anchoress but “ane” cat, a number that remains consistent whatever the variants in the manuscripts and medieval translations of Ancrene Riwle.2 While modern readers often find the feline provision amusing—­one quips that the passage “obverts 17

18   Pets

the monotony of a rigid didacticism”3—­the guide’s recognition that having one cat breeds the desire for more marks a problem well-­attested in the period’s other religious writing. For cats, even then, had a particular talent for distraction.4 The eleventh-­century Liber Confortatorius by Goscelin of Saint-­Bertin, written to Eve, an English recluse, insists that “no cat, no chicken, no little animal, no irrational creature, should live with you: fleeting time should not be wasted.”5 Thus in the fifteenth century an unfortunate nun named Margaret suffered in purgatory, since she “had a little dog and a little cat following her, both of them aflame,” and would not be relieved from them until the “drosse of syn”6 was fully burned away. The most widespread cat-­warning appears in John the Deacon’s ninth-­ century life of Pope Gregory the Great: a certain hermit, a man of great virtue, wanted to know what celestial house he could hope for as his reward for having forsaken the world; that night as he slept, he was outraged to discover that Gregory the Great’s reward would match his.7 He is corrected by a divine voice, which explains that asceticism lies not in dispossessing oneself of wealth, but rather of the desire for it: while Gregory distributes his goods day and night to the poor, the hermit takes great delight in his possessions, though they comprise “nihil . . . praeter unam gattam” (nothing . . . but a single cat). This he “very often caressed, as if it were a fellow lodger, caring for it on his lap.”8 The twelfth-­century adaptation of the story by Gerald of Wales, included in his manual for rulers, has the cat-­loving hermit physically visit Rome, drawn by Gregory’s reputation for holiness; he watches a Pontifical procession disapprovingly, then returns to his cell, whereupon he hears an admonitory, slightly punning, voice: “Pluris habes catum quam praesul pontificatum”9 (You esteem the cat more highly than the pope does the pontificate). When the story appeared in the Golden Legend of Jacobus da Varagine, knowledge of the envious hermit and his beloved cat became well-­nigh uni­versal: apart from its many vernacular translations, the work survives in Latin in more than one thousand manuscripts.10 However much the story means to condemn pet-­love, medieval translators lavish attention on the cat with a specificity that betrays at least

Pets    19

some imagined delight in holding one. Thirteenth-­century French verse translations of Life of Gregory accuse the hermit of being prouder of or having greater delight in his cat than Gregory has in his riches.11 To describe how the hermit “loved and fed and played with, kissed and polis”—­that is, polished, or “tiens et aplanies” (held and caressed) the cat—­both translations use a verb for petting that wonderfully evokes the act of continual caressing, as the verb also means to “smooth” or “flatten,” as one does with farmland.12 The word appears in another French translation, where “In those times there was a hermit of great virtue who had left all things for god and had no possession except for a cat, which he caressed often [aplaignoit souvent].”13 In English, the story appears in the Gilte Legende, where the hermit “handelest and strokest” his cat “eueri day.”14 The version translated late in the fifteenth century by England’s first printer, William Caxton, may be the most delightful of all: “And in that time there was a hermit, an holy man, which had left and forsaken all the goods of the world for God’s sake, and had retained nothing but a cat, with which he played oft [often], and held in his lap deliciously.”15 From a strictly religious perspective, none of this is acceptable. Apart from the scolding of nuns cited above, we have, among other statements against pets, this representative condemnation from a thirteenth-­century Italian Franciscan chronicler, Salimbene di Adam, who complains as follows: I have seen in my own Order certain Lectors of excellent learning and great sanctity who had yet some foul blemish, which caused others to judge lightly of them. For they love to play with a cat or a whelp or with some small fowl, but not as the Blessed Francis played with a pheasant and a cicada, rejoicing in the Lord.16

Yet whatever their disapproval, every account of the corrected hermit joins him in delighting in the cat. All attend to how cats get up onto laps, how they invite us to hold them, to caress them, to stroke their tails. Regardless of the utilitarian Latin vocabulary for cats—­musio, murelego, which both might be translated as “mouser,” or even cattus, which the

20   Pets

seventh-­century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville derived from captura, “capture”—­none of these texts speak of the cat’s usefulness; all are interested exclusively in its companionship. All it takes to bring the celestial thoughts of an ascetic down to earth is this little animal, perhaps kept for practical reasons, but always scrambling out of its life as a mere hunter of vermin.17 Modern scholars of animals sometimes imagine that pet-­keeping is a phenomenon particular to modernity. Harriet Ritvo discovered it at the start in the nineteenth century;18 Laura Brown and Ingrid H. Tague in the eighteenth;19 Juliana Schiesari in Renaissance Italy during the invention of private space and the relegation of women’s lives to mere domesticity;20 and, after enumerating a host of early modern and enlightenment pets, and a handful of medieval ones, chiefly from elite environs, Keith Thomas still speaks of the evidence of “the emergence of the pet as an animal kept for private emotional gratification.”21 Quantitative changes can be qualitative changes; attitudes toward animals might have changed as pet-­keeping became more visible in the cultural record, and as animal-­ powered transport became uncommon. But increased visibility should not obscure what came before. It’s not uncommon for animal and cultural historians to observe that the English word “pet” did not generally refer to pampered domestic animals until the early eighteenth century; claims like these should still note, however, that the word’s medieval Irish original, petta, perhaps derived from the French petit (small), does carry such a meaning.22 Comparativists will note that neither the French animal de compagnie nor the German Haustier quite achieve the elegance of the modern English “pet”: but given the substantial material evidence of medieval pet-­keeping, such Whorfian approaches are as unconvincing as they are unnecessary.23 Arguments about temporal origins of companion animals should be left to scholars of early humanity and anthropologists. Long ago, James Serpell pointed out that pet-­keeping is a trait not uniquely modern or Western but one shared by humans in general, of whatever class, culture, or period. A 12,000-­year-­old grave in what is now Israel contains a boy with his arm wrapped around a puppy; another grave on Crete, 3,500 years later, includes a high-­status human

Pets    21

and a cat, both with their heads facing west. Proof of pet-­keeping in the Middle Ages can be assembled from negative as from more approving sources. Jean the Deacon’s story of the envious hermit may itself be sufficient evidence that even the poor could conceivably keep animals for companionship. During the eleventh or twelveth centuries, a dog was buried in southwestern France. Of average size, the dog had suffered broken bones on at least three occasions, but there is no evidence of its carcass having been abused, or its having been skinned for its fur, or butchered for its meat. A victim of abuse, it was also cared for in death, perhaps by those who beat it, or loved it, or both.24 The 1260 General Chapter of Narbonne condemned friars for keeping cats and birds, allowing friars to keep them only “for the removal of unclean things.” Official attacks on monastic pet-­keeping in Rouen, Ely, and Hampshire also survive.25 The fourteenth-­century Saxon Mirror, a German law code surviving in hundreds of manuscripts, requires owners to pay compensation if their domestic dogs, wolves, deer, bears, or monkeys caused any damage.26 Doubters might argue that these animals still served primarily practical functions, as hunters, as guardians, as killers of vermin, excepting, one supposes, the deer, bears, and monkeys. Squirrels are another suitable answer to these charges. The inside of a fifteenth-­century love ring from France or England features an engraving of a woman with a leashed squirrel.27 The margin of a mid-­fourteenth-­century manuscript of the

Figure 1.  Squirrel with belled collar. “The Luttrell Psalter” (1325–­1340). Copyright The British Library Board, Add MS 42130 33r.

22   Pets

Quest for the Holy Grail pictures a squirrel chained to its pole, perched atop a little squirrel house; a similar squirrel house shows up in an early fourteenth-­century Flemish Psalter.28 Domestic squirrels also appear in the fourteenth-­century Hours of Anne of Bohemia and twice in the Luttrell Psalter.29 The early fourteenth-­century Ormesby Psalter also has a lady with a squirrel in her hand, as does one of the English Chertsey Tiles, dating to the last decade of the thirteenth century.30 Monastic visi­ tation records, like those of Archbishop Eudes in mid-­thirteenth-­century Rouen, complain about the predilection of nuns for keeping this animal.31 These squirrels were certainly nothing but pets, and if we know them primarily as pets kept by wealthy women, it may be because records for the wealthy are more prevalent than those of the poor. Denying pets to the period before us, like denying pets to cultures we think far, far from our own, relegates these periods and these cultures to the purely functional, or it denies that companionship is also a use. The implications of the presumptive cultural difference are obvious: they have a lifeworld, we have a lifestyle; they use things, we enjoy them; they have tools, and we have toys; they are actually in touch with things, and we, being mere consumers, have too light a touch ever to be really connected with things as they really are. They know that animals are only there to be used, and we, somehow, have mistaken them for friends, with the implication that this treatment is somehow a little patronizing. We are moderns, and they are whatever came before, without the freedoms modernity enjoys and suffers. They’re what evolutionary psychologists expect—­the men, mostly, whose eros operates only according to subrational calculations of profit and loss. We would do better, however, not to draw too firm a line between utility and pleasure, admiration and love, a practically minded medieval mindset and a frivolous modernity. We can certainly do better by not presuming that we could have ever gone without the weird feelings that come with companionship, or to presume that other, supposedly more practical people need none of the special care that we believe our oversophisticated selves require. No one, of course, can deny that pets are more common now than they were five hundred years ago. But so too

Pets    23

are a great many other things. The point is that the study of medieval pets generates an analytical field of uncanny familiarity that interferes with the self-­perception of modernity, as we find the expected in unexpected places, operating perhaps according to rules of its own. It’s not that the past is somehow modern too, but that the divisions between present and past, metropole and periphery, and so on, go awry when we find a cat insisting in places we don’t expect to find it. Ridiculous Mourning: The Canis Legend One day, a knight goes out to join a nearby tournament, and his wife follows. Not wanting to miss the fun, their nurses abandon their stations, leaving behind both the knight’s greyhound and his infant son. Then from a crag in the nursery’s ancient wall, woken by the noise, an adder emerges and heads for the baby. The adder and greyhound fight: the cradle’s overturned, the adder wounds and poisons the dog, but the dog at last prevails. When the nurses sneak home, they find a room covered with blood, the baby nowhere to be seen, and in the shambles, the dog, howling with pain. They flee, but when the knight’s wife intercepts them, they immediately tell her that the dog has gone mad and killed the baby. The knight arrives home, and his wife delivers an ultimatum: kill the dog or I’ll starve myself to death.32 Then, fighting its pain, the dog stands on its hind legs with its forepaws on the knight’s chest, wagging its tail as it waits to be praised for its bravery. Instead, the knight cuts his dog in two and then orders the cradle removed. Seeing the baby underneath, unharmed and happy, “thay fanden alle / How the cas was byfalle, / How the naddir was yslawe / That the grewhound hadde todrawe” (they all found how the event had happened; how the adder was slain that the greyhound had torn to pieces; 874–­77).33 This is the Canis legend, perhaps best known to medievalists from Stephen of Bourbon’s thirteenth-­century inquisitorial record of his suppression of the cult of Guinefort, a sainted dog.34 Versions of the story are extant in English, French, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, and German, among other languages, with the oldest one some 2,500 years old, in Sanskrit. Sometimes the knight is just a farmer; sometimes he is a knight reduced

24   Pets

to poverty, and has nothing left but his wife, children, and a minimal coterie of aristocratic animals: a horse, a hawk, and the dog; sometimes the bird might stir the dog awake by rustling its feathers;35 the misjudged animal might instead be a mongoose,36 a serpent (defending the baby from a wolf!),37 or even, in the Persian Sindbad-­Namah, a cat;38 the animal sometimes suffers other unjust deaths, like beheading or a cracked skull.39 But in all versions, grief breaks the family. In one, almost Jacobean version, the wife kills the valiant animal, then kills herself in horror, and when her husband returns, he kills his child, and then himself.40 Otherwise the story tends to be one of the man turning on his wife and, especially, himself. His hasty action, when blamed on the misguidance of a woman, suited the story for inclusion in the frame narrative of the widely read Seven Sages of Rome, where a king’s new wife tries to convince him to execute his son from a former marriage: his counsellors talk him out of it with a series of admonitory stories, including this one. In this context, in whatever language, the story’s misogyny is unwavering: as in American country and western music, women may be changeable, but never dogs.41 The knight thus errors by betraying an aristocratic—­and interspecies—­ company of men. But he might betray even more. Depending on the version, he might try to expiate his mistake by cutting off the tops of his shoes and snapping his spear into pieces. Newly outfitted as a pilgrim with sandals and walking staff, he departs for the Holy Land, never to return; he might strip off his armor, and without taking leave of anyone, go “into þe woddes wilde, / And to þe forest fra al men, / Þat nane sold of his sorow ken”42 (into the wild woods, and into the forest far from all men, so that no one should know of his sorrow); and, uniquely, in one Middle English version, he goes out into his orchard, finds a fish pond, and “for dule of hys hounde . . . lepe in and sanke to gronde” (for grief for his dog . . . leaps in and sinks to the ground; 884–­85), drowning himself. The suicidal knight commits something far worse than self-­murder. He absurdly betrays the human community as a whole by treating as a grievable life or even as a friend what should be understood as only a divinely provided tool, like all animals. Dominant strains in medieval

Pets    25

Figure 2.  The dog unjustly killed. The Seven Sages of Rome. Attribution-­ ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-­SA 3.0), Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. germ. 149 18r (c.1450).

philosophy generally denied that animals could meaningfully participate in friendship with humans. Irrational animals, Aquinas explains, cannot be the objects of direct charity: since they lack the free will that would allow them to choose good, humans can wish no good for them; for the same reason, humans can have no authentic friendship with animals; animals’ inescapable mortality also bars them from charity, since humans wish other humans charity “based on the fellowship of everlasting happiness.”43 In short, because animals lack free will and immortality,

26   Pets

friendship with them would be pointless. Nonetheless, simply by wondering—­or pretending to wonder—­whether irrational animals could be loved out of charity, Aquinas admits that they merit a special kind of attention. Whether he wants to or not, he admits that animals must be considered as something different from the usual world of objects meant only for human use.44 Aquinas can be countered, or at least scandalized, with several medieval accounts of grieving for pets, generally, but not always, produced outside professional, systematic intellectual environs like the one Aquinas occupied. The Irish legends of the Death of Ulster Heroes feature the dog Dóelchú, the dog of the hero Celtchar, which runs wild and destroys crops. Celtchar calls for it three times, and Dóelchú comes to him, licking his feet. Celtchar tears out its heart with his spear, and as he raises its body high, the crowd crying out in grief, a drop of the dog’s blood runs down the spear “and went through [Celtchar] to the ground, so that he died of it,” perhaps from the potency of the blood, perhaps from his sorrow.45 The chivalric hero of the Middle English Sir Eglamour kills a giant’s anthropophagous pet boar, and before the giant tries to take his revenge on Eglamour, he first weeps for his “lytyll spotted hogelynne.”46 The giant’s grief is probably meant to be ludicrous, but the joke here is not directed at weeping for an animal, but rather at the grotesque figure himself and his ridiculously porcine grief object, for in tales like these, knights themselves not uncommonly wept and even went mad if their horses were killed in battle. Perhaps most surprising is a story included in the thirteenth-­century canonization dossier for Thomas of Cantilupe, thirteenth-­century Bishop of Hereford. A woman has raised (“eduvacerat”) a “quadam bestila, quam Gallice vocant Leyrum, multum similis mustellae” (certain little animal, which in French is called a leyrum [in modern French, a liron: a dormouse], very similar to a weasel). When a knight accidentally trod on it, she brings its crushed body to Cantilupe’s shrine, and with “voce flebili” (a tearful voice), prays that it be brought back to life; and, as this is a canonization dossier, the saint does just that. The account doubts only whether the animal is really dead (“mortuam, ut putavit” [dead, as she

Pets    27

thought]), and thus, perhaps, whether it had only been healed, rather than resurrected, by the saint.47 I am reminded of a story my father told me not many years before his death. In the late 1940s, when he was twelve years old, he came home from school to the family farm to find his father waiting for him on the porch. He was handed a rifle and told, “Your dog’s a chicken-­killer. Find it and shoot it.” My father, then a good son, did just that. But more than sixty years later he was still angry. He had always liked dogs and, at least from then on, hated chickens (“Even if I didn’t eat them,” he once told me, “I’d still kill them.” Only much later did I find out why). And from what I saw, he got along only warily with his own father. Yet he was also a fundamentalist Christian, a regular churchgoer and intimate of the Bible. Within minutes of telling me the story, he announced that dogs don’t have souls. An unwitting epigone of Aquinas, my dad was telling me that his own grief, his own anger, was ridiculous. He was ridiculing himself. Still, he grieved. Being in a community, like a fundamentalist Christian church, means sharing its sense of the good.48 In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed writes: We can think of gendered scripts as “happiness scripts” providing a set of instructions for what women and men must do in order to be happy, whereby happiness is what follows being natural or good. Going along with happiness scripts is how we get along: to get along is to be willing and able to express happiness in proximity to the right things.

One of Ahmed’s key examples illustrates too that happiness scripts depend on unhappiness scripts—­that is, on the unhappinesses that the dominant social order disallows. Ahmed’s example belongs to the film If These Walls Could Talk 2, in a story of a lesbian couple split by death in 1961 in the United States. Edith, the survivor, waits in the hospital, able to speak only of the death of her “very good friend.” “Their relationship,” Ahmed observes, “is hidden under the sign of friendship, while friendship itself is produced as a lesser tie, a tie that is not binding, that does not endure

28   Pets

in matters of life and death.”49 Their relationship is one that is, in Judith Butler’s terms, “ungrievable.” Butler’s work on mourning and community, in Precarious Life and Frames of War, traces how grieving forms community on both the basis of who is grieved for and those who are ungrieved, whose loss is unrecognizable as such. The human community, like any other, sustains itself as much by the deaths it does not acknowledge as by the deaths it does. But Butler also writes about “the transformative effect of loss,” that which “cannot be charted or planned”;50 so too do the editors to Derrida’s Work of Mourning observe that “in mourning we find ourselves at a loss, no longer ourselves, as if the singular shock of what we must bear had altered the very medium in which it was to be registered.”51 Yet so long as the grief possesses social legibility, there is a limit to transformation. If there are rituals, grief will find a home, and the griever will find a home in it. If the loss is recognizable as a proper grief object, emotional collapse, alcoholism, even suicide will be understood as tragic, not as absurd or contemptible. Otherwise, as in the story Ahmed analyzes—­in which Edith finds herself finally homeless and discarded, shunted aside unthinkingly by the children of the woman she loved—­the grief simply cannot register as such among those who already believe they know what to mourn for. Laurence Rickels’s “Pet Grief ” describes the comparable loss, while also marking its particular differences from even the unacknowledged losses of humans: “We keep the individual animal close to us until death opens wide a mass grave. Everyone likes your adorable pet and spends quality time giving the animal an interspecial context for life. But when the loved one goes: shut up and get a replacement.”52 The dead pet is, as Rickels writes, the “lost loss,” distinct from what Ahmed writes about, because it might be accorded some social recognition, for a while, and with the expectation that one pet can be replaced with another. The social agreement holds that clinging too closely to this particular dead individual would be to commit an “errori insanissime,”53 a very foolish error, a term I draw from Augustine’s sneering reference to any reading of the Sixth Commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” that takes it as applying to nonhumans too.

Pets    29

The Canis story is a story of such an error. For the knight to remain himself, which is to say, for him to remain socially legible, he must frame others appropriately. He must find his place in the human family portrait, which means that animals must die like animals, unmourned, discarded, and unthought. But the knight has refused to give up his loss. While the knight loves his child dearly, he considers his greyhound “anoþer iuel,”54 his other love. The loss has opened something in him, and he refuses to get out. He has been astonished by recognizing his shared vulnerability with what the human community can recognize as only a dog. Or at best a certain kind of friend, where friend means “not family.” What he does can make no sense, for outside of this and a handful of other medieval texts—­Bevis of Hampton for example, whose hero is unwaveringly loyal to his horse55—­there is no medieval allowance for according any animal the status of “friend” or “sworn brother,” categories of classical and medieval chosen kinship that might justify the knight’s valuation of his dog above his own family and—­especially—­ above his wife. Though he doesn’t often kill himself in the tradition, everything he does in response, including his pilgrimage and his disappearance into the woods, is suicide, for he has become dead to what had been his world. From the perspective of his wife and nurses, he has joined his dog in what Butler terms nonlife, or in a Lacanian “second death” in which “a subject’s symbolic status is no longer recognized by the community,”56 a life that dominant community scripts cannot recognize as having ever significantly lived. Pet love may not be sufficient. If some of our best friends are dogs, pet love may do nothing to impede the violence through which the human sustains itself as human. Like all love, it may be unjust, since love abandons the many to shadow by arbitrarily settling on the one.57 Love must risk suspending the distinction between worthy and unworthy objects; it must risk failing the charted strictures of “the ethical or political generality.”58 Literature may offer us few sharper examples of this failure than the pet-­lover who, like Christ’s perfect disciple, hates what had been his family (Luke 14:26), who finds himself captured by love. If this is charity, it is a charity that disdains the humans supposed to naturally deserve it.

30   Pets

None of this is sufficient, of course. But despite the story’s misogynist homosociality, despite the knight’s pathetically masculine act—­he solves the problem with violence, because he knows no other way to restore his honor—­there still may be tools here to unthink the human; we may still find here a way of mourning that, in refusing to be well-­adjusted, opens “up other possibilities for living,”59 which must require other possibilities for dying. It requires something other than just asking our companions to go along with us; it requires losing oneself, come what may. The Prioress and Her Pets The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales features portraits of most of the collection’s storytelling pilgrims. The forty-­four lines given to the Prioress, the fourth so described (after the Knight, his son the Squire, and their servant, the Yeoman) and the first professional religious pilgrim, rank her portrait among the longer ones (exceeded only by those of the Summoner and Pardoner [forty-­five lines], the Parson [fifty-­one lines], and the Friar [sixty-­one lines], themselves all ecclesiastical workers). Chaucer first focuses on the Prioress’s modesty and her singing of the divine service, features expected of a nun, albeit not particular to an administrator like the Prioress. But soon he describes, at some length, her love of pets, the “smale houndes hadde she that she fedde / With rosted flessh, or milk and wastel-­breed”60 (small hounds she had that she fed with roasted meat, or fine white bread; I.145–­46). Her dogs have made her the pet-­lover perhaps best known to Anglophone literary studies, and perhaps the most unfairly maligned. By the fourteenth century, “smale houndes” were a common accessory for English women of fashion, like the Prioress, who herself took pains to “countrefete cheere / of court” (imitate courtly comportment; I.139–­40). An early fourteenth-­century satiric portrait of a lady suggests that “Vous ke avez cheens dount estes encoumbrez, / Alez à la dame, si vous allegez” (You who are burdened with dogs, go to the Lady, if you would be relieved of them): one imagines that the Prioress might too be identified as an easy mark for anyone wanting to rid themselves of unwanted pets.61 Even her keeping dogs in her abbey is not entirely unexpected: the very

Pets    31

many late medieval prohibitions of conventual pets attest to their ineradi­ cable, irresistible presence.62 Her dogs might therefore be counted among the supposedly amusing traits that savvier critics now recognize as simply de rigueur. For example, her French “after the scole of Stratford atte Bowe” (after the school of Stratford-­at-­Bowe; I.125), rather than of Paris, is well-­suited to an England where French was learned in the classroom: a status language, important for, among other things, property administration and law.63 Her table manners—­“in hir coppe ther was no ferthyng sene / of grece” (in her cup she left no iota of grease; I.134–­5)—­may be more problematic: Chaucer notoriously adapted these lines from the Roman de la rose, where they belong to techniques of seduction transmitted from an old woman to her protégée. Chaucer’s fifteenth-­century readers could have missed the joke, however, given the proliferation of such advice in their period’s many etiquette manuals, bearing titles like “Urbanitas,” “The Babees’ Book,” or “Stans Puer ad Mensam”64 (The Boy Standing at Table): they might, then, have just thought her well-­trained. Amid all this, the pets might have been not much more than a foible, and even less than this if weighed against the sins of the General Prologue’s other high-­status clerics, the Monk and Friar, whose many venereal enthusiasms reek of sybaritic secularity. Except, however, the portrait gives the Prioress’s pets just slightly less space (nine lines) than her table manners, and it is not her keeping, but her feeling for the pets, that captures this attention. The concept that frames the discussion is “conscience”: the pets section begins with “But for to speken of hire conscience” (But to speak about her conscience; I.142) and ends with “And al was conscience and tendre herte” (And everything was conscience and tender heart; I.150). To illustrate her conscience, we are told first that “she wolde wepe, if that she saugh a mous / Kaught in a trappe, if it were deed or bledde” (she would weep if she saw a mouse caught in a trap, if it were dead or bleeding; I.144–­45), and then how she fed her dogs, and how she “soore wepte” (wept bitterly; I.148) if one of them died, or “if men smoot it with a yerde smerte” (if men struck it sharply with a stick; I.149). In its first use, the word “conscience” may mean something like “moral judgment,” the expected meaning of

32   Pets

the word in Chaucer’s era; but in its final use, it seems to have fallen from its initial denotation into being a mere indication of a certain intensity of fellow feeling.65 In a professional religious world dedicated to an airtight system of human supremacy—­as in Aquinas’s arguments about the irrelevance of charity for nonhuman animals, discussed in the previous section—­a “conscience” for beaten dogs or dead mice would have been not just silly, but morally and intellectually monstrous, an ersatz conscience that smothered conscience’s proper function. Chaucer obviously wants us to recognize her animal love as at least a little off, and the criticism has been generally happy to play along, either gently or not, depending on the writer’s attitude toward both nonhuman animals and women.66 The Prioress’s compassion for mice has been commonly judged to be evidence of her “delicate sensibilities,”67 an obviously gendered and at least faintly dismissive description of someone moved to tears by dying and battered animals. Long ago, George Lyman Kittredge, the giant of early American Chaucer studies, diagnosed the Prioress’s dogs as a symptom of her “thwarted motherhood.”68 The diagnosis continues into nearly the present. One critic observes that the Prioress feeds her animals exactly what Avicenna, the widely respected eleventh-­century Persian polymath, recommended be given to infants, a fine historical specificity that the article then undermines with a Kittredgean claim about her “maternal instincts.”69 Others have still more recently pegged her instead as childish, because of her attachment to animals, or her mealtime worry over the cleanliness of her orifices, identified as a symptom of her “psychosexual developmental issues.”70 She has been called inane,71 extravagant,72 and a morally isolated, “self-­indulgent,” egocentric performer of feelings for “cuddly animals rather than people.”73 Some have assessed her as suffering “the suppressed sexual instincts of a big girl”—­a sniping allusion to the General Prologue’s “For, hardily, she was nat undergrowe” (For surely she was not undergrown; I.156)—­“who has transferred her emotional needs to dogs, rather than to human charity or spiritual devotion.”74 For the most part, the criticism has at least matched what the philosopher Kelly Oliver wrote in the New York Times on scorn for pet love: “To love animals is to be soft, childlike, or pathological. To

Pets    33

admit dependence on animals—­particularly emotional and psychological dependence, as pet owners often do—­is seen as a type of neurosis.”75 The criticism often adds to this bad cultural habit little but a nod to historical context and more than a whiff of misogyny. In sum, by checking off how she has failed the strictures of the Ancrene Riwle and other guides for the religious female, many critics have continued the medieval surveillance work of monastic visitation, which they compound with a psychoanalysis applied to everything but themselves. Notably, no critic has ever accused Chaucer’s Monk of “stunted psychological development” for putting “al his lust” in hunting and his pack of greyhounds: regardless of the very many prohibitions against clerical hunting, the monk is taken for all in all as but a man. Yet even the unpleasant criticism may be on to something. However misguided the judgements quoted above, the Prioress does indeed go awry, but she does so, crucially, in ways not quite reducible to standard accounts of other bad nuns. To be sure, some of her faults would have been familiar to Chaucer’s first readers. Her clothing and jewelry may be too ostentatious.76 When she bestows “rosted flessh, or milk,” or high-­ quality “wastel-­breed” on her dogs, she short-­circuits the compulsory reliqua almsgiving that alone justified the extreme “overprovision” of feasts in monastic and other houses.77 She violates the strictures laid down in a late fourteenth-­century conduct manual, which warns its intended audience not to take pleasure in little dogs, “nor yeue hem that the pore pepille might be susteyned with that deyen for hunger” (nor to give them what poor starving people might be sustained with), because even the poor, being human too, are “Goddes creatoures and seruauntis made to his lyknesse”78 (God’s creatures and servants made to his likeness). She nevertheless falls far short of the more lurid accusations against conventual pet-­keepers, like one leveled by a reformist treatise that imagined nuns routinely committing abortion or pleasuring themselves with inanimate objects or beasts.79 And the Prioress is not at all like the sad ladies of the chansons de nonnes, pining for the love of a man from within cloister walls; nor is she like the bad nuns of Piers Plowman or that strange, fragmentary late medieval dream vision titled by its modern

34   Pets

editors “Why I Can’t Be a Nun.”80 Being neither greedy, lusty, nor too robust, she does not resemble the many bad regular clergy of the General Prologue; she is neither “quarrelsome or recalcitrant, deceitful . . . unable to keep a secret, lacrimose, [nor] hungry for praise.” Being only, perhaps, “fond of luxury” and “sensual,”81 but for the wrong kinds of things, she may be bad, but strangely so. Medieval moral writing iden­tified certain sins as more appropriate to certain classes, professions, or ages than to others. The old were expected to be envious or greedy, and the young lusty: some sins are normative, others perverse. The same perhaps might be said of virtues: although late medieval conduct manuals advised children not to make fools of themselves by beating dogs with sticks,82 the Prioress imitates this courtly virtue not for sake of dignity, but for the love of animals. The peculiar combination of her faults and virtues that makes up her “conscience and tendre herte” (I.150) leaves her lingering uncannily in slightly the wrong register, fawning over the wrong love objects, at once misdirected and too precise, poorly fitted to her role, our expectations, and her habits. Above all she cherishes the wrong things. The pain or the pleasure of what she loves registers as neither in the dominant discourses, which thought of nonhuman animals only as noncomprehending innocents, whose lives will come only to nothing. In Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Palemon represents the stance neatly when he complains that while “a beest may al his lust [desires] fulfille” in its life, after it is “deed he hath no peyne” (dead it has no pain; I.1318–­19): a temporary grief like that is a grief that matters little, whereas his grief, supposed to be timeless, demands sympathy and care. A weeping heart was a common feature of late medieval Christian piety; but given over as it often was, either to the continually reenacted suffering of Christ or to the needs of souls in purgatory, what sense could it possibly mean to weep for an animal whose suffering ended as soon as it does?83 And in the courtly communities the Prioress “counterfeits,” even worldly love was an investment in a future, bound to the preservation of a lineage, so that, as Walter’s court worries in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, no “straunge successour sholde take / youre heritage” (IV.138–­39). Thus, it is not the “delicate sensibility” but

Pets    35

the object of her sensibility that condemns the Prioress’s tears to derision. Hers is a love unattached to any recognizable future, perpetuity, or heritage. All it has is her strange little community in the time that it lasts.84 Bluntly put, according to any number of standard catalogs, the Prioress’s attachments are queer, not because her love for her pets is erotic, both because her desires are “ambiguated” and because they so trouble the purportedly normative attachments of the other pilgrims, and many critics.85 While her portrait is unquestionably a symptom of misogyny, the Prioress’s portrait cannot be reducible to this cause: rather, it is as if that discourse is trying vainly to wrangle her odd feelings into some familiar pattern. Unlike The Canterbury Tale’s Alisouns, in the Miller’s Tale and Wife of Bath’s Prologue, the Prioress suffers from neither sexual availability nor garrulousness; unlike the hideous old fairy woman of the Wife of Bath’s tale, she suffers no unsettling desire for a handsome man; and unlike Custance or Griselda, she does not submit to the traffic in women. Instead, she opts out. Compared to these women, indeed compared to the attachments of the other pilgrims—­so often eager for money, for unearned respect for their learning, for “to been ycleped Madame” (to be called “My Lady”; I.376), like the wives of the artisans—­the Prioress stands apart, with her strongest feeling disinvested from any merely human honors. We might respond to her better by not discovering how she fits the “felaweshipe” (I.32) of the other pilgrims despite all this. To point out that nuns often kept pets, to call her compassion excusably feminine, to insist that we never see her actually weep for mice—­which would be, at any rate, merely “the height of satire”86—­these are attempts at normalization, an attempt to find her a suitable historical context. The very oscillation of the criticism between normalization and scandal, indulgence and disgust, best respects her portrait’s ambiguity. Keeping the Prioress uncertain preserves her as someone who will never work quite properly, as someone who could function as one of those resources from the past that might, in José Esteban Muñoz’s words, be reanimated to break open our “impoverished and toxic” present.87 The key critical move may be, then, to take her feelings as sincere. Admittedly, not a straightforward move, as her comportment is certainly

36   Pets

imitative: she takes pains “to countrefete cheere / Of court, and been estatlich of manere, / And to ben holden digne of reverence” (to copy courtly bearing, and to be dignified in her behavior, and to be considered worthy of reverence; I.139–­40). But this material follows the description of her table manners; the discussion of her feeling follows, with a sharp break, “But for to speken of hire conscience” (I.142). That is, although the Prioress’s outward behavior might be an emulative display, Chaucer marks her feelings as belonging to her inner life. To judge these feelings as inauthentic or, what is much the same, merely imitative, is not only to mis­ read the portrait’s structure,88 it is to rely on an unconsidered humanism certain that no one could really feel such things for nonhumans and certain, too, of the possibility for sincere feelings between humans. Compounded at times by misogyny or a critical certainty of having the right politics (which so often exercise themselves against supposedly frivolous women of fashion),89 these judgements hold that some attachments are normal and others grotesque, some ways of feeling truly engaged, and others only pathetically misguided. Calumny like this is piled on any enthusiastic pet owner, on women in particular, or on any man whose feelings are judged to be too “delicate,” incorrectly oriented, too drawn to “the attractive outworkings and trappings, rather than the substance, of religion,”90 in defense of any community practice believed to have an authentic if irreducibly indefinable “real core,” what Žižek once usefully called the “thing.”91 The point is not that she is sincere and beyond all criticism, but rather that if we must distinguish sincerity from insincerity, we should do so on the basis of something other than presumptively normative attachments, while always remembering that even sincere feelings can never quite reach their mark without remainder. To take the Prioress’s feelings as sincere is therefore not to rescue them, but to understand them as of a piece with an artistic work whose “sincere” feelings include cruelty, jealousy, greed, and, for that matter, love, very little of which ever works comfortably. For supposedly normal love, as Dominic Pettman observes in his writing on the films Zoo and Tierische Liebe (Animal Love), can entail “monomania, projective narcissisms, and so on,” a “familiar libidinal economy, involving the kinds

Pets    37

of struggles around difference and recognition that can lead to passive-­ aggressive sulking because of perceived miscommunication.”92 Kathy Rudy’s Loving Animals: Towards a New Animal Advocacy is one of the most direct engagements with this kind of love. Donna Haraway’s work on companion species and messmates (Companion Species Manifesto, When Species Meet, Manifestly Haraway, and Staying with the Trouble) may seem an apter framework, so too might Ahmed’s critiques of the politics of happiness, discussed in my previous section. But Rudy better clarifies the queerness of the Prioress’s community than these critics, because she is far more willing than Haraway to linger in a love for her dogs in ways that have nothing to do with pride in their athleticism, or with musings on imperceptible bio-­ontological dispersals as her dog licks her mouth, and because, much more than Ahmed, laudably devoted as she is to feminist, lesbian, and antiracist struggle, Rudy’s loves risk charges of triviality. For when Rudy writes about finally breaking up with what she is certain will be her final girlfriend and deciding to devote her household life entirely to her dogs, she observes that “the task of coming out as gay was a piece of cake compared to coming out as—­what? . . . there is not an adequate name for the kind of life I lead, the way my desires organize themselves around animals, especially dogs,”93 because “it’s not so much that I am no longer a lesbian . . . it’s that the binary of gay and straight no longer has anything to do with me. My preference these days is canine.”94 Rudy cooks for her dogs: one loves any kind of meat, another eats more than anyone would expect her to, and another, Duncan, a yellow lab mix, loves breakfast food: oatmeal and scrambled eggs. Rudy finds that feeding her dogs is another way to “talk” to them, for through this specific affection and knowledge, she makes “their subjectivity more visible.”95 The Prioress’s charity for her pets may do something similar, not least of all because The Canterbury Tales is a com­ munity originating in a tavern and oriented toward a meal. In such an environment, eating together means not just sharing a meal, but making a community. And the Prioress steps aside from her human companions, to risk being ridiculous by forming her community around loves that can have no human reason. Directed at mice that want her food, at dogs

38   Pets

that offer nothing in return but play, loyalty, and their love, her charity earns her only contempt. And companionship. I recognize that it would be morally monstrous to end here, because the Prioress is infamously the teller of an account of a “litel” schoolboy murdered by Jews as he sings a hymn to the Virgin Mary while traversing their ghetto. Critics have sometimes linked the Prioress’s love of animals to her anti-­Semitism, which thus reframes her tale as a grotesque, kitschy satire. The interpretive move obviously aims to rescue Chaucer’s reputation and, by extension, the wellsprings of English literature, Western Civilization, and so on. We can acknowledge that Chaucer saves himself slightly by not being as eager as some of his contemporaries to write bloodthirsty accounts of the killings of Muslims or Jews. Compared to the skull-­splittings of Sir Gowther or the disembowelments and anthropophagy of the Siege of Jerusalem, the massacre of Muslims in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s tale is almost antiseptic. Still, Chaucer’s Parson, one of his few “good” pilgrims, himself notoriously snipes at the “cursed Jews” (X.599) in the massive prose confessional manual that passes as his “tale.” Chaucer criticism makes this very point often.96 Furthermore, neatly identifying the Prioress who tells the tale with the Prioress depicted in the prologue assumes a psychological consistency that misses the more functional mechanism of character in The Canterbury Tales: Chaucer gives the Prioress this tale not because she loves pets, but because a miracle of the Virgin Mary is a fitting tale for a nun.97 At any rate, several independent fifteenth-­century copies of the Prioress’s Tale circulated free of any possible “satirical” connection to the Tales as whole.98 Rather than collapsing the portrait’s Prioress into the tale-­telling Prioress, and swallowing up her embarrassing pet love in her horrific anti-­Semitism, we should instead observe more precisely how the Prioress’s tender heart for animals leads her not into contempt for the human community, or some part of it, and not into cruelty, but rather into a different community, illegible to the larger communities of The Canterbury Tales, but a community for all that. Like the other animal lovers of this chapter, the hermits and their cats, and the knight and his murdered dog, the Prioress has bound herself tightly to something that seems not to make much sense. This attachment to

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communities that do not make sense to dominant communities, that are given over to futures and pleasures that will not be recognized, that refuse to give up even in the face of contempt or worse, is key to Mari Ruti’s pragmatic reappraisal of the notorious “antisocial thesis” of queer theory: shattering the self for one community does not mean shattering it altogether, but rather making other kinds of selves, other kinds of communities.99 To condemn the Prioress, or to say she simply doesn’t make sense, is, then, not only too easy on Chaucer but also an encouragement to avoid thinking through the more central problem, that of community itself, occasioned by the Prioress, her feelings, and her loyalties. When the Prioress gives her dogs a roast—­of whatever animal, but presumably not the flesh of dogs or mice—­she marks which animals matter and which do not, which are truly alive for her and which relegated to nonlife. Conveniently enough for her conscience, the only animals she weeps for are the ones she doesn’t eat. Again, the appropriate response is not to observe that the Prioress is an anti-­Semite and a failure as an animal rights activist, but rather that the Prioress’s distribution of care marks how community operates, but in a monstrous register that calls attention to itself. For, as Susan Crane observed, in a Butlerian manner, about the Prioress, “Communities are shaped by withholding as well as expressing ‘conscience and tendre herte.’”100 When the charity looks ridiculous, when it refuses to follow the rules or have the right objects, when it makes no sense to us so long as we stand outside its particular frame, this dynamic of withholding and expressing is immediately apparent to us.101 Her choices are strange and horrible, not just contemptible, to many of us, and even to some of her contemporaries: on the inside, her dogs and mice, and on the outside, most other animals and most humans. The best analysis cannot rest there, but must return to the problem of community itself, to recognize that any community means making choices, and to recognize, again, that predetermined notions of “natural” or “appropriate” objects of love render unthinkable what should be primary ethical questions. We can therefore end no better place than where her portrait does, with her brooch:

40   Pets Of smal coral aboute hire arm she bar A peire of bedes, gauded al with grene, And theron heng a brooch of gold ful sheene, On which ther was first write a crowned A, And after Amor vincit omnia.102 She wore a rosary on her arm made of small coral beads, adorned with green beads, and a very shiny brooch hanging from it, on where there was written first an A with a crown, and after that, Love Conquers All; I.158–­62

This is not “amor amat omnia,” love loves all, but a metaphor of violence and conquest, of claiming territory, drawing borders, and dividing the whole between valued subjects and those compelled to serve and be left for dead. Her love fights on behalf of some and lets the rest be butchered or executed. It is too easy to condemn the brooch as being the wrong kind of feeling, too easy to worry whether the “amor” is celestial or erotic or both. We should instead use it to probe our own good conscience, to wonder at charity, at what it leaves out, and whether it can ever be possible to get it right.

[ t wo] Isolated and Feral Children A group of children, confined to a house, never taught to speak; an infant, certain to grow up to supplant the king, exposed and left for dead, only to be rescued by a mothering wolf; a child, raised imperfectly by animals, unwilling or unable to adapt to the expectations of the human culture that reclaims him: stories like these, of children deprived of—­or preserved from—­human nurturing and cultural training, have habitually been understood as saying something about what it means to be truly human, truly sovereign, or even to be confirmations of the superiority of a particular ethnos or faith. They are, in other words, taken as stories of isolation, and therefore as stories of truth, as if the truth is the thing that emerges only when all merely secondary things have been refined away. This chapter argues that these stories are better understood as about community, sometimes failed, sometimes successful, and ultimately, in my treatment of the Wolf Child of Hesse, a choice that makes one group at the expense of another. Normative notions of what the human should be make these stories speak predictable lessons about the opposition between spoken language and irrationality, nature and culture, and even care and violence. But the material this chapter considers does not quite take the human for granted. It poses it as a question, and in the space opened by that question, we have the chance to answer it otherwise. From the Forbidden Experiment to Little Communities In the biblical story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–­9), the “children of Adam” decide to erect a tower to “reach to heaven” to “make our name 41

42    Isolated and Feral Children

famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands.” The story concerns the architectural possibilities brick opens up over stone (11:3); collective rather than regal politics, as later commentators, not scripture itself, lay the responsibility for Babel Tower on the tyrant Nimrod;1 and—­once again—­ God’s jealous destruction of human felicity.2 Most famously, it is about the catastrophic origins of linguistic diversity, and therefore yet another tantalizing account of the irretrievable loss of a first, happy unity.3 The commentary on the story is at times studiously indifferent to the language God used to create the world in Genesis’s first creation story and Adam used to name the animals in the second: Augustine sometimes does no more than allow that the language of Adam and Eve, whatever it might have been, might have survived to the present, but he insisted that it was but a sop to human limitations to imagine that God “spoke” in language.4 The many other commentators more willing to risk a definite opinion tended to settle on Hebrew.5 The Book of Jubilees, a second-­ century BCE retelling of Genesis, is one of the earliest witnesses of this tendency, when it has God teach Abraham the “revealed language,” the lost “language of the creation,” once shared with “the animals, the cattle, the birds, everything that walks and everything that moves”;6 when the Syriac Cave of Treasures—­a Christian universal history begun as early as the third century and finalized by the sixth—­advocates for Syriac, its sneering reference to the “ignorant mistake” of those who believe the first language to be Hebrew is itself evidence for how common the identification must have been already.7 Key early Christian advocates for Hebrew include Isidore of Seville and Bede, and even Augustine himself, in his City of God;8 the eighth-­century commentator Alcuin of York explains why: to realize the typically neat symmetry of medieval exegesis, it was suitable (oportuit) that Christ’s salvific language (which Alcuin supposed to be Hebrew) should also be the language through which death first entered the world.9 In a letter protesting her own monastery’s excommunication, the twelfth-­century abbess Hildegard of Bingen proposed that the first language was not speech but angelic musical harmony, in whose glory Adam shared until he sinned, which is why her nuns should be allowed again

Isolated and Feral Children    43

to sing their services.10 With Hildegard’s longing to participate in the first “divine melody”; with Jubilees and its angelic language; with the generally “numinous character” imparted to Hebrew in speculations on Babel and Eden;11 and, for that matter, with the “Evernew Tongue” of a ninth-­or tenth-­century Irish visionary hexameron, the Tenga Bithnua, which will also be understood by the “sea-­creatures and beasts and cattle and birds and serpents and demons, which all will speak at the Judgment”:12 in all this, we witness the paired motives driving attempts to identify the first language. The first is to find a language prior to a diversity of tongues to get at language’s truth, as if singular things are truer or at least better than heterogenous ones. The second motive is to arrive at that great unity, God himself, through his own language, which must be a language, like Hebrew, that persists into the present day, just as God himself does.13 The original language becomes key to burrowing under the wreck of the present, to emerge once again in paradise, or in the time of the Last Judgment and the coming glory. Language’s inadequacy can be cured of its seemingly irreducible confusion, to be known once again as the voice of truth. The first record of an experimental attempt to find such a foundation dates to the fifth century BCE, from Herodotus’s story of Psamtik (whom Herodotus calls Psammetichus), a powerful and long-­ruling pharaoh of the twenty-­sixth dynasty. Though the Egyptians reputed themselves to be the “oldest nation on earth,” others argued that the honor belonged to the Phrygians: wanting experimental confirmation, Psamtik had children raised in isolation with a herdsman commanded never to speak to them, with the expectation that children freed from educational meddling would produce the primordial language, spontaneously. After two years—­as the first Englishing of Herodotus runs—­“both the little brats, sprawling at his feete, and stretching forth their hands, cryed thus: Beccos, Beccos,”14 which Psamtik and his advisers understood as the Phrygian word for bread. Thus he had the unpleasant surprise of learning that not the Egyptians, but the Phrygians, were the oldest culture. Later commentators have tended to misunderstand the story’s punchline: it is less about the first language than the first people.15 What Psamtik wanted was not

44    Isolated and Feral Children

a general principle of the origin of language, but a miraculous, and therefore extracultural foundation for his claims to cultural superiority. Medieval Latin Christendom could have heard only a faint report of the story. Herodotus would not be translated into Latin until the later fifteenth century, while his Psamtik story first slides into European vernaculars only with the widely popular Silva de varia leccíon of the sixteenth-­century Sevillan humanist Pedro Mexía, itself quickly translated into French and English,16 and thence into virtually uncountable paraphrases—­for example, the discussion by the Montpellier physician Laurence Joubert (d. 1582) of linguistic origins and deafness.17 But even as long ago as the first century of our era, Herodotus already tended to be cited, by Cicero among others, only through intermediaries.18 Aristoph­ anes’s Clouds uses the Psamtik episode to form an insult about “moon-­ bread” children, suggesting he trusted his audience to get the joke. The first-­century Roman rhetorician Quintilian tells what may be an indepen­ dent, or garbled, version, in which not one but several princes conduct the experiment.19 A version told in the Exhortation to the Greeks (the Protrepticus) by the early Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria (d. 215) has not a herdsman but goats raise the children, a strange nar­ rative that would be reproduced in commentaries on Aristophanes’s at least as late as the tenth century.20 But Quintilian sustained little regular readership in medieval Latinity,21 while Clement’s Protepticus, a rare work even in its original Greek, would not be translated into Latin until 1551.22 Clement’s contemporary Tertullian also tells the story in his To the Heathens (Ad nationes), drawing on a version Herodotus rejected, in which not a herdsman but a nurse with an amputated tongue nurtures the children: her injury is sufficient for Tertullian to dismiss the story, as no one could survive the removal of “that vital instrument of the soul.”23 Just one medieval manuscript of To the Heathens survives, a ninth-­century copy used by the notorious polemicist Agobard of Lyon, and I have encountered no medieval quotation of or even allusion to Tertullian’s retelling of the story. Ad nationes would not appear again until 1625, well after Herodotus and Psamtik made their way back into European writing.24

Isolated and Feral Children    45

The next version of the experiment appears an astonishing 1,700 years after Herodotus, in the thirteenth-­century chronicle of the Franciscan historian Salimbene di Adam, who, several decades after the events he claims to be recording, explains that Frederick II, Holy Roman emperor and king of Sicily, wanted to know what language children would spontaneously produce if they were never spoken to, or even “blandirentur” (dandled).25 As thirteenth-­century Sicily was a particularly language-­rich environment, Salimbene may have imagined Frederick conducting the experiment to establish a linguistic foundation for his rule in a place without any obvious cultural unity. He has the emperor wonder whether the spontaneous language would be Greek, Latin, or Arabic, or perhaps even their parental language, the kind that can be acquired without training, as if there were no originary language and as if one’s mother tongue were, so to speak, a genetic inheritance. What he learned instead is that without affection, without clapping and gestures and funny faces and babbling from their nurses, babies die (non enim vivere possent sine aplausu et gestu et letitia faciei et blanditiis baiularum et nutricum suarum). Faint allusions also appear in the works of a number of medieval Jewish writers, who take various stances on the experiment—­Abraham Ibn Ezra (d. 1167) expects that a child raised in a desert with only a mute nurse would spontaneously produce Aramaic; Hillel of Verona (d. c. 1295) expects the result to be Hebrew; Abraham Abulafia (d. 1291) and his contemporary Zerahyah ben Isaac ben Shealtiel Hen each doubt that any language would emerge, though both insist on Hebrew’s special character.26 The Scottish historian Robert Lindsay (d. 1580) has his King James IV conduct the experiment in 1493 with a mute woman housed with two children on Inchkeith, a barren island in the Firth of Forth. Lindsay concludes dubiously with “Sum sayis they spak goode hebrew bot as to my self I knaw not bot be the authoris reherse” (Some say they spoke good Hebrew, but as for myself, I know nothing except what the authors have written);27 he is writing late enough that his unnamed and uncited “authoris” may include Herodotus himself, or at least Pedro Mexía, with the pharaoh garbed now in tartan.

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Finally, the story is included in a great many records of the sixteenth-­ century court of the Mughal emperor Akbar, in chronicles kept in Persian and Arabic by both Akbar’s allies and enemies, and in Italian and Latin by Jesuit missionaries, whose letters and memoirs helped spread the story through European early modern and Enlightenment philosophical, medical, and travel writing. The anonymous continuation of the Akbarnama, the Book of Akbar, may be the only version that has any grounds to claim to be a first-­hand account, although even this may well be just a local variant of the Herodotus story, transmitted to Akbar’s court by European travelers. To prove that speech comes from hearing, Akbar had several children raised by “tongue-­tied” wet nurses, confined to a building that came to be called the “dumb house.” When Akbar vis­ ited the house in 1582, four years after the children were first interred, he heard “no cry . . . nor any speech . . . no talisman of speech, and nothing came out except the noise of the dumb.”28 Much the same story would be told decades later in the anonymous Dabestan-­e mazaheb (the School of Religions), written between 1645 and 1658, whose surprising conclusion is that since “letters and language are not natural to man,” but only the result of instruction and conversation, the world must be “very ancient.”29 The Arabic Selection of Chronicles by Bada’uni (d. 1605) has the version closest to those told by European writers. Bada’uni records Akbar’s astonished encounter with a man who can hear, despite having “no ears nor any trace of the orifice of the ear”: to test the origins of language, he has several infants locked up, with “well-­disciplined” (rather than mute) nurses, who are commanded not to give the children “any instruction in speaking.” Then, without any transition or explanation, Bada’uni changes Akbar’s motivation: he now wants to determine which religious language the children would naturally produce, presumably Arabic, Hebrew, or Latin.30 Roughly twenty children are locked up in what comes to be called the “dumb house,” and “three or four years” later, none can speak. Nothing more is said about the earless man. Several early European accounts of Akbar’s court omit the story. Giovanni Battista Peruschi’s 1597 Informatio del regno, et stato del gran re di Mogor (published in Latin the following year, with additional material

Isolated and Feral Children    47

on Japan) limits itself to worrying whether Akbar could be an ally of Roman Catholicism,31 while the True Relation without All Exception, of Strange and Admirable Accidents, Which Lately Happened in the Kingdome of the Great Magor, from 1622, is little but an exoticizing indulgence in fantasies of absolute royal power: it devotes several of its thirteen pages to an often-­told story of a problem-­solving ape, which frolics among the Mughal courtiers and Akbar’s two hundred “boyes . . . which hee keepeth for unnaturall and beastly uses.”32 Akbar’s forbidden experiment enters Europe via the letters of another Jesuit missionary, Jerome Xavier (d. 1617), who claims to have had the story from Akbar himself. Xavier explains that “nearly twenty years ago,” Akbar closed up “thirty children,” and “put guards over them so that the nurses might not teach them their language.” There is nothing about an earless man. Xavier instead only has Akbar conduct the experiment with an eye toward following “the laws and customs of the country whose language was that spoken by the children.” Since “none of the children came to speak distinctly,” Xavier calls the experiment a “failure”; for Akbar, it may have been something else, since it allowed him to justify following “no law but his own.”33 Here Xavier presumably means the short-­lived, syncretic faith of Dīn-­i Ilāhī, designed by Akbar himself. Here we have yet another story of Roman Catholics disappointed in their search for Prester John, the Asian or African king who might swoop in from “behind enemy lines” to crush Islam. Once Xavier introduced the story, other European writers would, so to speak, close the narrative loop, by telling it with Herodotus’s account.34 Retellings often secularized the Akbar story, rendering it only about language origins rather than religion, so establishing the habit of modern critics to read the forbidden experiment as about anything but ethnos or religious creed.35 Its inclusion in Daniel Sennert’s posthumously published medical manual, his Paralipomena, merits individual citation for its unexpected analogical conclusion about language learning and parrots, which, as he explains, also can “never produce any human voice by their own will” (nunquam sua sponte ullam humanam vocem proferunt)36 unless they are captured as chicks and taught to speak. By the late seventeenth century, Akbar’s experiment would be collected

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alongside stories of children raised by animals, like the sheep-­boy of Ireland,37 who belongs to a mythic tradition I treat in the chapter’s next two sections. Perhaps the strangest strain in modern discussions of these stories has been their credulity, especially given that Herodotus himself doubted the historical reality of at least some versions of the Psamtik tale. Modern scholars sometimes take the trouble to quibble with Herodotus by insisting the experimental method seems more Egyptian than Greek, or vice versa, and that the word “Beccos” sounds more Egyptian than Phrygian. Professionals in early childhood development and linguistics, and even a few cultural historians, not infrequently dispute the validity of its design, sometimes after making a point of their skepticism over whether it happened. Others flaunt their conscience by condemning Psamtik’s cruelty. The scholarship makes for strange reading not only because it misunderstands or forgets how early historiography works but also because no one unpleasant enough to conduct these experiments could possibly be convinced by these arguments to abandon their vices.38 Such errors of interpretation can be avoided simply by sorting the language experiment with the other, equally grandiose claims that clustered around all these potentates: Psamtik, for example, was reputed to be the inventor of the labyrinth,39 while Salimbene frames his story with a set of what he calls the emperor’s other “superstitions.”40 Frederick had a scribe’s hand cut off for spelling his name “Fredericus” instead of his preferred “Fridericus”; he had someone else sealed and drowned in a wine cask to demonstrate that the soul dies with the body (a point Salimbene counters with a flurry of scriptural citations); and he ordered one of his men go hunting, and the other to sleep through the day, and when the hunter returned, had them both cut open to see who had better digested his food. James IV was a famous polymath, well known for his mastery of many languages. Bada’uni presented Akbar as such an irreligious tyrant that chunks of his history were repressed until after Akbar’s death. In part, these rulers are all said to carry out the deprivation experiment because cruel experimentation is what learned, excessively curious tyrants do. With all this in mind, we should not worry whether these stories could

Isolated and Feral Children    49

be true, straightforwardly, but neither should we simply dismiss them as untrue: the “truth” of the stories is rather the conceptual problems that led to their writing in the first place. One key motive in these experiments is that of getting past culture and into a human behavior, trait, or characteristic that just is, automatically. That is, what the experiments seek is a cultural element—­not only language, but a particular language, or a religion, or an ethnos—­that comes into being without any need for cultural or even human support. Unlike the thought experiments of the Islamic theological novels by Ibn Tufail (d. 1185) and Ibn al-­Nafis (d. 1288)—­which each have children spontaneously generated on remote islands, where each systematically and rationally, without cultural training, arrives at philosophical and religious truths41—­the classical language deprivation experiment wants a truth that emerges from nowhere, freed from any train of causes, rational or other­ wise. They want a culture to be a miracle, unreliant on anything else for its existence. Unlike the isolation thought experiments that would proliferate in linguistic speculations in eighteenth-­century Europe—­in Bernard Mandeville’s 1729 Fable of the Bees,42 the Abbé de Condillac’s 1749 Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines,43 and Montesquieu’s Pensées,44 among others—­the classical thought experiment does not expect that the first language would be primitive or “savage,” but rather that it would be perfect, divine, or at the very least, identical with some culturally dominant language of the present. The eighteenth-­century iso­ lation experiment from Mandeville forward emerges from a European present increasingly certain of its own cultural supremacy and worldwide dominance; the earlier versions, produced before European worldwide domination, feature cultures that seek to ground themselves in something surer than their own momentary supremacy. The classical isolation experiment is thus driven less by a hunt for origins than by a hunt for foundations, a hunt that, moreover, wants to do without the ongoing, reciprocal, and uncertain work of cultural interchange, as if anything acquired by deliberation, desire, and compromise must be inherently suspect. In brief, the classical isolation experiment wants something impossible, a natural culture. It wants the benefits of language, ethnicity, and

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religion, all the supposedly “timeless” or “traditional” stuff of a “people,” without having to own up to the ongoing negotiations, historicity, and inadequacies of living through particular manifestations of these categories. But what they tend to find instead, however, is the necessity of care, and the catastrophe of its absence, excepting one late version of the Akbar experiment, from François Catrou’s 1708 Histoire générale de l’empire du Mogol. Catrou bases his account on Niccolao Manucci’s 1698 History of Mughal India. Manucci has Akbar hunt not for religious but rather, simply, linguistic origins. Some thought it would be Hebrew, others “Chaldean,” likely meaning Aramaic, others Sanskrit, “which is their Latin.” Here Akbar provides no nurses but rather commands only that no one, “under pain of death,” was to speak to the children or, notably, “to allow them to communicate with each other.” When the children turned twelve, they were questioned, but responded only by cringing, and remained “timid [and] fearful” for the rest of their lives.45 Catrou reproduces all of this, with one enormous change. Being curious as to what language children would speak who had never learned any, and having heard that Hebrew was a “natural language” (une langue naturelle), Akbar shuts up twelve children with twelve mute nurses, and a male porter, also mute, who is never to open the doors of the “château” in which they have all been confined. The result: When the children had reached the age of twelve years, Akbar had them brought into his presence. He then assembled in his palace people skilled in all languages. A Jew who happened to be in Agra could judge if the children could speak Hebrew. It was not difficult to find in the capital Arabs and Aramaic speakers. On the other hand, the Indian scholars claimed that the children would speak the Sanskrit language, which they use as their Latin, and which is used only among the learned. They learn it to understand ancient books of Indian philosophy and theology. When the children appeared before the emperor, all were very astonished that they could not speak any language. They had learned from their nurse to get by without it. They expressed their thoughts only by gestures, which they used as words. In the end, they were so wild and so timid that it was a great

Isolated and Feral Children    51 deal of trouble to tame them, and to loosen their tongues, which they had made almost no use of in their childhood. [Quand les Enfans eurent attaint l’âge de douze ans, Akebar les fit venir en sa presence. Il rassembla alor dans son Palais des gens habiles en toutes les langues. Un Juif qui se trouvoit à Agra pouvoit juger si les Enfans parloient Hebreu. Il ne fut pas difficile de trouver dans la Capitale des Arabes & des Chaldéens. D’une autre part les Philosophes Indiens prétendoient que les Enfans parleroient la langue Hanscrite qui leur tient lieu du Latin, & qui n’est en usage que parmi les Sçavans. On l’apprend pour entendre les anciens Livres de la Philosophie & de la Théologie Indienne. Lorsque ces Enfans parurent devant l’Empereur, on fut tout étonné qu’il ne parloient aucune langue. Ils avoient appris de leur Nourrice à s’en passer. Seulement ils exprimoient leurs pensées par des gestes qui leur tenoient lieu de paroles. Enfin ils étoient si sçauvages & si honteux, qu’on eut bien de la peine à les apprivoiser, & à délier leur langues, dont ils n’avoient Presque point fait d’usage dans l’enfance.46]

This version is the first time in the Akbar narratives that the children acquire language, and, barring the minimal account about James IV, the only time this happens in the whole tradition. Though pessimistic about the social training of the children, Catrou is surprisingly sympathetic to their language, using the same construction, tenir lieu, to act or substitute for, for both the relation of Sanskrit to Latin and sign to spoken language. The 1826 English translation notably misses this key point. While it explains that Sanskrit “holds among them the same place, as does the Latin among the learned in Europe,” a correct translation, it then presents gestures as only “substitute signs for articulate sounds,” not quite incorrect, but incorrect in its erasure of Catrou’s own verbal echo; then it editorializes further with “they used only certain gestures to express their thoughts, and these were all the means which they possessed of conveying their ideas, or a sense of their wants.”47 From Akbar’s perspective, the experiment is a failure, as it is for Catrou’s first trans­ lator; for Catrou himself, perhaps not. From our perspective, one hopes, the story can be read as a kind of success, of the nurse and her charges

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circumventing the assumptions of the experiment to join together in a minority community, frustrating any expectations of foundation, origin, or the grandeur of a majority culture. In all these experiments, we see that language, cultural specificity, religion, all these traits key to the “extra” or immaterial qualities that must accompany any animal that claims to be human, and any human recognized as belonging to the dominant human community, do not exist in some isolated, reasoning creature. Here there is no pure logos, no culture that just is. The human creature emerges in negotiated communion with others, in a shared time and space, or it doesn’t emerge at all. Catrou’s version especially gives us a language of gesture, one that cannot pretend to incorporeality, one that, unlike spoken language and its written analog, cannot pretend so easily to be refined away from a particular body by impersonal abstraction. As the children have learned it from their nurse, neither does sign language function here as the first, primitive language—­as it does in the “Linguistic Darwinism” hypothesized in the nineteenth century; rather it is a learned language, culturally developed and transmitted and worked out, collectively, sharing its present with Akbar, his court, and his experiment.48 If the classical thought experiment wants to find the language that says “here language is,” or “here reason is,” or even “here is our culture, naturally,” if it wants to find the truth that is unwaveringly still with us, what Catrou provides instead is a language that is a “here I am” enabled by a “here we are,” together, in the same time and with the same validity as any language, attesting to the need for care and recognition, in as impure and shifting a relationship as any community. At least one question remains: Why should the story always be one of failure? Apart from James IV, none of the rulers in the classical isolation experiment get what they want. The classical isolation experiment centers on tyrants; the story is about language, of course, but it is also, perhaps more so, about sovereignty and its failed dreams. Like the stories of Alexander weeping when he realized there were no worlds left to conquer, or his being interred, despite his empire, in a grave no larger than any other man’s, these stories are about the inevitable collapse of

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any tyrannical pretensions to power. In wanting a culture or a language that just is, as a miracle, or pure decision, because it comes from nowhere and needs not justify itself to anything, the sovereigns are effectively seeking an analog to their own fantasies of sovereignty. But what the potentate witnesses, finally, is what he should have known all along: the impossibility of going it alone, and his own private helplessness, which can never be overcome, but which can only be shared. Feral Foundlings Dating to between the fourteenth and eighth centuries BCE, the Akkadian story of Sargon may be the earliest written account of an abandoned child who grows up to reclaim his rightful inheritance as a great leader.49 Its narrative elements are famous for what they share with the Moses myth: the woven, waterproofed basket (Exodus 2:3), and the patriarch who orders the baby killed because he fears being supplanted (Exodus 1:9). Herodotus tells a similar story about Cyrus of Persia.50 Here the anxious patriarch is the uncle, who orders one of his men to kill the newborn Cyrus; he instead delivers the child to two slaves, a man, Mitradates, and a woman, Spako, who cherish and raise him. In his adolescence Cyrus reveals his natural qualities of leadership by bossing around his playmates; in adulthood, he deposes his uncle and founds a great empire. Here we have all the common features of the later abandoned child stories: the justly paranoid patriarch, the imperiled noble boy; his emergence from enforced obscurity into demagogic adolescence and heroic adulthood as savior, lawgiver, and imperial, civic, or ecclesiastic founder; the typically humble surrogate parents—­Moses is the outlier—­ and one more key element, a first, animal fosterer. For in Herodotus’s source, Cyrus must have been first nurtured by a dog: “Spako,” Herodotus explains, presumably rationalizing an earlier myth, comes from the Median name for dog, “Spax.”51 Cyrus’s career is most famous as the earliest analog for the much better known story of Romulus and Remus and the nurturing wolf. The first certain attestation of this story is the wolf and twins statue said by Livy to have been dedicated by the Ogulnius brothers in 296 BCE; an

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Etruscan mirror from roughly a century prior may be the earliest sur­ viving representation.52 Extant written versions, like Pliny’s, may stem from the lost second-­century BCE history of Fabius Pictor.53 Although not quite ubiquitous—­Cicero’s Republic’s brief retelling refers not to a wolf but only vaguely to a “silvestris beluae”54 (a wild forest beast), while the Roman histories by Appian and Diodorus of Sicily lack it altogether—­ the Romulus and Remus story, through its association with the astonishing cultural longevity of Rome, made it the obvious paradigm for later stories like this. Here the wicked paternal figure is an uncle, Amulius; the mother herself, variously named Ilia, Rhea, or Rhea Silva, is a temple priestess like Sargon’s mother; the boys’ father is himself either Mars, an unnamed suitor, or even the incestuous Amulius, disguised as a god. As with Herodotus’s gloss of the name Spako, rationalizations rush in here too: Livy numbers among those who suggest that lupa (a female wolf) is really just slang for a prostitute.55 Dogged research has packed the story with others about founding fathers who draw their outsized potency from the teats of some convenient canid. These stories in turn run with rampaging Indo-­European männerbünde or jungmannschaften, from central Asia to Ireland, from the Dacians, Scythians, and Thracians, to the Hittites to the Guelphs, groups renowned for young men who don the names of wolves or wolf masks or whom narrative or war propaganda style as cynocephali—­ dog-­headed humans, which fought alongside the Lombards, at least in rumors the Lombards themselves encouraged—­or even as werewolves.56 Further medieval examples are easy to collect. The German Wolfdietrich, the illegitimate child of a princess and a passing (and cross-­dressed) nobleman, acquires his name because after being cast out as an infant, a wolf snatches him up to feed him to her pups, which prefer to dine with rather than on him.57 The Icelandic saga of Ali Flekk, in which he is abandoned as a child and later cursed to live, for a while, as a werewolf, is a variation on the theme.58 In Ireland, Achtán flees from the king, and while she sleeps in the open, a she-­wolf steals and then fosters her son, who becomes the legendary high king of Ireland, Cormac Maic Airt.59 The Irish saint Ailbe’s father is Olcnu, who lives in Ara Cliach at the

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court of King Cronan, his birth mother a serving maid (ancilla) named Sant. Fearing that the king will kill her for a socially disruptive pregnancy, Sant flees and gives birth, but the king still commands that the “ignoble child” (puer ignobilis) be removed from his court; left under a rock, he is found by a wolf, who “loves him greatly” (valde amans), and “like a tender mother [quasi mater tenera] raised him gently among her whelps.”60 When a man finds and claims the infant, he explains to the grieving wolf-­mother that the child now belongs to him; much later, when Ailbe has grown into adult sainthood, he finds himself near a wolf hunt; one wolf flees to him and puts her head on his lap, Ailbe recognizes her as his foster mother, and gives her safe passage to fetch her cubs and return at dinnertime, henceforth to eat bread with him and his fellows.61 The latter story’s reuniting of lupine foster mother and child is unusual. Typically, as with Cyrus, Romulus and Remus, or Wolfdietrich, the foster mother drops from the narrative altogether, as does the birth mother, whose typical narrative function is only to be impregnated, to flee, to give birth, and to lose her child. The standard feral child story thus erases both mothering and its labor twice, first by cutting off the child from its birth mother and what he owes her for her labor, and then by cutting off the child from the mother who raised him.62 Distressingly, the pattern has been repeated in much of the scholarship on these feral bands. Carlo Ginzburg’s important article on the complicated relationship of Marc Bloch and George Dumézil to interwar German, and especially, Nazi, mythography regrets the continuing preference in postwar scholarship for Otto Höfler’s exhaustive and credulous study of männer­ bünde (1934) over Lily Weiser’s more careful work (1927).63 Unlike Höfler, Weiser marked the Oedipal conflicts driving the stories of these bands of young men—­thus pathologizing what would otherwise appear admirable or natural—­and insisted that the rites of male bands were also accompanied by myths of feminine initiation and fertility, which Höfler ignored, and Dumézil undervalued. Through the double erasure of birth mother and foster mother in lupine myth, and the accompanying erasure of the narrative or political significance of women in one dominant strain of the material’s scholarly and popular reception, the male child is

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allowed to emerge into adulthood freed of all attachment and mutual obligation to women and care and indeed family, operating, so to speak, entirely under his own power.64 Masculine, genealogical isolation establishes the other key aspect of the feral founder—­namely, its paradoxical combination of extralegal wildness and sovereignty, features central to Agamben’s Homo Sacer and Derrida’s Beast and the Sovereign seminars, where a typical passage is: Being-­outside-­the-­law can . . . take on the form of being-­above-­the-­laws, and therefore take on the form of the Law itself, of the origin of laws, the guarantor of laws, as though the Law, with a capital L . . . were before, above, and therefore outside the law.65

The wolf has long been key to these formulations.66 Justin’s perhaps late second-­century Epitome of the Philippic History of Pomeius Trogus remarks on the Romans’ “principle of hatred towards all monarchs,” and no wonder, he observes, for they had “suckled at a she-­wolf ’s teats! That is why their entire population had the temperament of wolves, with an insatiable thirst for blood and a ravenous hunger for power and riches.”67 The sixth-­century Salic laws call grave robbers wargus. Old Icelandic law and literature, like the Volsung Saga, famously uses the word vargr, “wolf,” to describe outlaws, resulting in frightening portmanteaux like morðvargr (murder wolf), and in modern Icelandic, the brennuvargur (burning wolf, that is, an arsonist); but Old Norse mythography describes Odin, the lawgiver, as flanked ominously by his lupine companions, Geri and Freki. Derrida’s rare foray into Old Norse cultural criticism notes that the wolf Fenris agreed to be bound only if one of the gods puts a hand in his mouth; Tyr volunteers, Fenris bites off his hand, and thus Tyr becomes “the god and justice and oaths,”68 his hand swallowed by the very figure of the outlaw. Medieval Ireland endured symbolically wolflike young men, the fían, who bonded together to ravage the countryside until they came into their property.69 The anonymous twelfth-­century Lay of Melion liter­ alizes the metaphorical lupinity by having a lycanthropic English nobleman ally with a pack of wolves to revenge himself on his treacherous

Isolated and Feral Children    57

Irish wife; he grieves when his pack is captured and killed, but his wildness aims not at the law itself, but at a petition for legal redress for a violated marriage.70 Kim McCone writes of myths dating back to ancient Greece in which a hero defeats and then takes on the characteristics of his supernatural enemy’s guard dog: his classic Irish example is the culture hero whose victory christens him with the name of the very animal he killed, Cú Chulainn (Culain’s Hound), so becoming hero, dog, and terrifying otherworld force all at once.71 The pet wolf that incarnated the “awesome nobility”72 of Count Robert of Artois furnishes a late example; he festooned it with bells to apprise neighboring peasants (and their livestock) of its approach, or perhaps to add a musical note to their terror. With no small justice, he met his death in 1302 at the hands of the famously nonaristocratic victors of the Battle of the Golden Spurs. The lupine material’s extralegal aspect comes as no surprise. If the lion of fable is sometimes a tyrant, sometimes a wise king, and sometimes only a shadow of his former self, as he is in the opening fable of Berechiah Ha-­Nakdan’s medieval Hebrew collection,73 the wolf is rarely anything but a killer, a glutton, and a bully. The fable of the wolf and sheep was universally known: a wolf and lamb come to a river, and the wolf, drinking upstream, accuses the lamb of muddying his water. When the lamb offers to step aside and let the wolf drink first, the wolf declares that the law will decide their case. John Lydgate’s collection of fables, produced early in his prolix career, has the impatient wolf “no lenger on the lawe abood” (no longing waiting on the law) just before he devours the lamb.74 The rapaciousness is expected; the wolf ’s legal claim a little surprising. His apparently pointless gesture—­as the wolf would have eaten the lamb regardless—­makes sense if we understand the wolf as incar­ nating the law of might makes right, a paradoxical “right” grounded on nothing but its own, feral decision: the wolf itself, and its implacable power, is the very law that it refused to wait for. Notably, Romulus—­the victorious, city-­founding twin—­recruits his first citizens from outcasts, bandits, and escaped slaves, as clear a demonstration that the sovereign “civilizing hero”75 is also an analogue with the homo sacer, the criminal who, because he can be killed with impunity, is paradoxically excluded

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from the law by being included within it, without remainder or pro­ tection. Agamben’s interpretation of Marie de France’s Bisclavret along these lines is perhaps the most well-­known reading of this short werewolf narrative outside medievalist circles.76 Marie probably wrote in twelfth-­century England. In its hunting preserves, wolves were the particular targets of violence on behalf of the king; they would be killed by professionals, the luparii, without ceremony, so, in a sense, “lawlessly,” in a kind of “bare death,” while game animals would be killed only by the king or his agents in ceremonies celebrated in a host of aristocratic hunting manuals.77 And it is just such a space, a forest, and likely a hunting preserve, that the king of Marie’s story finds Bisclavret, a creature that sometimes lives as a human, sometimes as a wolf. Throwing himself on the king’s mercy, Bisclavret and king soon become inseparable companions. They hunt together, and when Bisclavret finally resumes his human form, he does so behind closed doors, on the king’s own bed. For Agamben, the intimacy necessarily symbolizes sovereignty’s secret truth—­namely, the “special proximity of sovereign and werewolf ” in which the spirit of the forest “dwells permanently in the city,” or, in this case, in the heart of the royal court. If the secret truth of the sovereign is his alliance with the wolf, the very image of illegitimate violence, it is because of the sovereign’s “miraculous” capacity to suspend the law, since nothing guarantees and authorizes the law but the sovereign’s own decision, which itself must be extrajudicial.78 A story of violence, sovereignty, and the lawless foundation of the law is what we get if we fall in wholly with the myth of the canid’s wild carnivorousness and all that follows. The tangle of fascinations includes the dog being only partly domesticated, the wolf being Europe’s most feared carnivore,79 bands of young men as packs of dogs, and the Oedipal rivalry between father and son, who struggle over a mastery of a paternal law that will never empty itself of its obscene core. A supposedly “dis­ ruptive” retelling of the story, with these actors, regardless of how sus­ piciously it recasts the primal horde and obscene father of Freud’s Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, is bound to reinforce rather than undo the centrality of sovereignty and the law and its violence.80

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But there is no need to keep retelling the story. Although wolves do have pride of place in feral founder stories, they are far from the only animals that encounter and nurture mythic heroes. Goats suckle the abandoned Attis, Asclepius, Aegisthus, and both Daphnis and Chloe, cows Aeolus and Boeotus, a mare Hippothous. We also have Telephus, nursed by a deer, Cybele, by leopards, Paris of Troy and Atalante by bears, and Semiramis, by birds, which beakful by beakful fetched milk for her from the buckets of unwatchful cowherds. An eagle catches the infant Gilgamesh midair, when the king of Babylon flings him from a tower to be rid of his future supplanter. And Hieron, wonderfully, is succored by bees.81 By remembering these accounts, and by not exclusively concentrating on the adults the children become, but on the first caregivers, we can recognize that the story of the wild founder is also a story of the wild foundling. The commonality here is not the canid, with all its supposed wildness and danger, but rather the need to be fed. The grandeur and danger of the wild founder can be dissolved by remembering them as rescued babies, needing and getting protection. The servant commanded to kill the children never quite does it: sometimes his mercy is due to rank incompetence, or fear of future retribution from the child’s mother; Romulus and Remus are saved from drowning because the more than ample Tiber floods and catches their floating basket in the spread of its muddy banks. But more often the killers are reminded of their own children, or they are struck by the child’s beauty, or its need. Herodotus on Cyrus is already typical: And with that the cowherd uncovered [the child] and showed it. But when the woman saw how fine and fair the child was, she fell a-­weeping and laid hold of the man’s knees and entreated him by no means to expose him.82

Putting encounters like these at the heart of the story shifts attention away from competition between father and son, away from a boy’s alliance with the beast that incarnates the unruled sovereign or warband. The story can thus become one about sympathy and weakness but, crucially,

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not about helplessness, except insofar as everything is helpless in itself, with some kind support. What the children find themselves in, then, is not the wilderness, not pure nature, lawless and untamed, but rather a care relation, with no expectation of reward, because it is burdened or graced by no genealogical investment. What happens here is a more complicated story than can be found by forcing the concept of “sovereignty” to live up to its pretensions until, as is inevitable with all abstractions, it turns on itself under deconstructive pressure.83 For even sovereignty, as Peggy McCracken has recently observed, can be characterized by “affective relations,”84 with all the lived sloppiness that this implies. For McCracken, medieval sovereignty, often figured through human–­animal relations, is centered not around a wild, paternal, and domineering sovereign, but around social relations of dominion and mutual obligation, necessarily impure, often inadequate, but still a matter of negotiation. Furnished with a revised model of sovereignty, we can return to, and correct, Agamben’s reading of Bisclavret. On his way to his peroration, Agamben remarks briefly on the court’s approval of Bisclavret’s lupine attack on his estranged wife and its willingness to subject her to torture to learn what relationship the beast has to her. But, in an aside, Agamben blandly terms the attack an “encounter”; to hurry on to his argument about sovereignty, he then pushes past the “encounter” and subsequent enhanced interrogation with a brusque “what is important, however,”85 as if Marie’s sovereign imaginary were somehow distinct from its narrative of violence against women. Without questioning, indeed, without being willing to notice the knot of a particularly masculine, misogynist sovereignty, Agamben produces a reading of Bisclavret that does no more than reinforce its express nar­ rative content, its pessimistic modeling of the operations of the court, and, by extension, its pessimistic modeling of the modern political order that is Agamben’s longstanding concern. If we read stories of feral children differently; if we stop waiting for Agamben’s messianic break to get something better than sovereign lawlessness; if we put off, in short, our cynical weeds, we might instead notice other political orders operating

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in narrative patterns that were with us all along. It is not that sovereignty would cease to be a problem, or that gendered differences and hierarchies would no longer matter or that they would resolve, impossibly, into harmony.86 But if we read the stories not already certain of what we’re bound to find in them, these relations might be made to move in other directions than offered by those still obsessed with männerbünde. In brief, if we concentrate on care and these unfamiliar, temporary communities, the material can be saved from being yet another masculine story of violence, domination, and sovereignty, and from outworn stories of the dialectical encounter of the civilized boy with wilderness. Feminist analyses of care, dependency, and vulnerability are one mode for starting again. Though this material focuses its critique on the contractual, rights-­ based political model of modern democracies as developed in eighteenth-­ century political and moral philosophy and refined by John Rawls, its focus on mothers and children, and other caretaking relations, on the “primary dependency”87 and inescapable vulnerability of all subjects—­ for, as Martha Fineman writes, “we all live subsidized lives”88—­are of obvious relevance for rethinking even this ancient, monarchical material. The lawless, sovereign political model wants to begin with what the children get from the wolves: the unhoused wilderness that takes what it wants and makes its own laws. But by identifying, at least strategically, “the dynamic relation between mothering person and child . . . as the primary social relation,”89 we can give better attention to abandoned children, who live only if their dependencies are met, and to their caregivers, who act not out of free, rational choice or calculation, but out of an instinct that is, crucially, not typically disdained for its instinctuality. Beginning here completely reframes how these stories are generally made to work.90 Nancy Yousef ’s work on Rousseau’s State of Nature has already shown one method for rethinking such primordial myths, as she argues that Rousseau’s work is really about the “impossibility of using solitary self-­sufficiency as a theoretical starting point for reflection on human development.”91 We have to begin in a crowd and know that we must stay in a crowd. There is no sovereign escape.

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Here we have not the illusion of autonomy, but the necessity of mutual aid. The last term I draw from a cluster of anarchist ecologists and geographers, who, in the wake of the collapse of the Paris commune, aimed to replace the Malthusian “struggle of all against all” with a better master story of how the Natural Order works.92 Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution argues that historical and economic models naturalize themselves by following this faulty biological model.93 Kropotkin’s counterargument does not aim to free human culture from biological compulsion but rather to tell a story of “mutual aid,” running from protozoa to the humans of nineteenth-­century Russia, in which the order of things is knitted not by love, nor even by sympathy, but simply by the need for community. Nothing does well on its own. If this is a survival of the fittest, the best fit comes from those best able to come together to help each other. The law of all against all explains the wild men, founders and lawbreakers, enjoying the unregulated pleasures from which they issue their regulations. And if all one wants to explain is this, it works. But the law hardly accounts for the babies found and rescued, denied the society of the patriarch, yet still finding succor in the supposed wilderness. This is not the Lacanian baby, dangling at the cusp of an unmatchable identity and unsatisfiable law; it is not even the baby of Butler’s Precarious Life, perhaps to-­be-­mourned-­for, hailed as a member of the community mainly by our anticipation of its social vulnerability and future death; it is a baby found and helped, the baby whose entanglement in community attests not to sovereign law but to ongoing negotiations of mutual aid. Even the männerbünde needed to look out for each other. The Wolf Child of Hesse Whatever their differences, stories of language deprivation and feral founders each aim at isolation: the former isolate their children from spoken communication, to await whatever will emerge from them spontaneously, and thereby give witness to the “natural,” precultural presence of a particular language, ethnos, faith, or humanity; the latter isolate the founder from mundane human upbringing, and especially mundane

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mothering, to grant the aura of the supernatural to their hero and the authority he inaugurates. Until the fourteenth century, nearly all feral child stories concerned such superhumans. Late in the middle ages, however, the pattern of such accounts began to change, from stories of heroic foundation to stories of deprived children who, having missed out on culture, come from, and end up, nowhere. It is these latter stories, particularly those from the eighteenth century to the present, that have most captivated modern scholars. The most famous are Amala and Kamala, two wolf-­raised girls discovered in 1920 near Calcutta; Oxana Malaya, the so-­called dog girl of the Ukraine, is another, as is the five-­year-­old girl from the Siberian city of Chita, never allowed outside her apartment but—­per the 2009 police report—­ conversant in the language of the dogs and cats who raised her.94 Some are clearly fanciful, like the gazelle-­boy of the Mideast, captured in 1946 in Iraq or Syria or some other nearby country, capable of great leaps, and coaxed back into civilization only when his captors cut his tendons.95 Others might not be, like John Ssebunya, a Ugandan who fled into the forest after witnessing his father shoot his mother. But the story’s details waver too, even as newswriting offers Ssebunya as a rare, certifiable feral child: the date of his mother’s murder (1988 or ’89), Ssebunya’s age when he enters the woods (from two to six), and the length of his time with the monkeys (eight months to three years). Prior to the thirteenth century, there may be only one account in European writing about an obscure, unheroic, and unfortunate feral child, from Procopius of Caesarea’s sixth-­century Wars of Justinian, in which a goat suckles a child abandoned during wartime, and jealously insists on being its sole mother when Roman women seek to suckle it instead.96 Moving back chronologically from the seventeenth century, I can otherwise cite the Dutch physician Nicholaes Tulp (well-­known today from Rembrandt’s 1632 Anatomy Lesson), whose section on a “bleating boy” (iuvenis balans) describes an Irish sheep child which had acquired a taste in fodder as refined as the fussiest of ovines (manducabat solum gramen, ac foenum, et quidem eo delectu, quo curiosissimae oves): Tulp judges the boy “more a beast than a kind of human” (magis ferae, quam hominis

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speciem).97 Still earlier, we have the wild man of Saint Claude in the Jura, described in a 1403 letter by Avignonese theologian Nicolas de Clama­ ges: unable to speak, armed with terrible nails, covered with hair, and beneath that, a layer of moss, the Wild Man is captured by peasants, after a struggle, when he leaves his snowy mountains for the comforts of a valley; he was then brought to a monastery, where he refused the offered food and died nine days later.98 The taxonomy of fools in Konrad of Magenberg’s fourteenth-­century Book of Nature is less spectacular: so-­ called moriones are “those who had grown up in the woods far away from sensible people and live like beasts.”99 Albert the Great’s monumental thirteenth-­century treatise on animals provides an anecdote about a pair of wild humanoids caught in the forests of Saxony; the female died from wounds inflicted by hunters and their dogs, while the man learned to speak badly (imperfecte valde) and to walk upright on his two feet.100 Nicolas, Konrad, and Albert’s texts are obviously not about feral chil­ dren. My genealogy includes them to index a key transformation in the ancient feral child myth—­namely, its gradual assimilation to the figure of the wild man. These hairy, club-­wielding, and generally nonlinguistic characters were already well-­known from Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain and one strain of the medieval Alexander the Great romances,101 but they proliferated especially in fourteenth-­and fifteenth-­century medieval art and literature. Drawing on the cultural trend, later medieval stories of children nurtured by animals—­like Valentine et Orson, the bizarre Tristan de Nanteuil, or the wildly popular narrative of the Swan Knight—­are not about civilizational founders, but about wild children, saved by animals, but also animalized by them, and therefore, like wild men, requiring domestication to thrive in noble environs.102 Culture here needs no miraculous, feral founder. It has already happened, and these children need to catch up to it. Writing in the wake of the cultural shift, modern scholars of feral children tend to sort feral children of all sorts with cases of extreme childhood neglect: for them, there is no functional difference between Amala and Kamala, Victor of Aveyron, Marie-­Angélique Memmie Le Blanc, and Kaspar Hauser; to be with the animals is much the same,

Isolated and Feral Children    65

ultimately, as having been desperately alone, as learning nothing, bereft of all community, as being autistic or melancholic.103 My final section concerns the stories that mark the hingepoint between the ancient and modern feral child story, a tiny archive from late medieval Germany, from Albert the Great (cited above), Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum, the Chronicles of Saint Peter of Erfurt, and the sermon collections of Jacques de Vitry. The Dialogus miraculorum is a thirteenth-­century doctrinal guide and wonder collection, structured, like many medieval works, as a conversation between a teacher and his student. When the master tells a story about wolf that kidnapped a girl to force her to extract a branch stuck in the mouth of another wolf, the student matches his master with his own anecdote: “I saw a certain youth who was snatched up by wolves as an infant and was raised by them into adolescence, and he knew how to run on hands and feet in the manner of wolves, and how to howl” (Ego quendam iuvenem vidi, qui in infantia a lupis fuerat raptus, et usque ad adolescentiam educatus, ita ut more luporum supra manus et pedes currere sciret, atque ululare).104 Many of Caesarius’s stories are straightforwardly pedagogical: one is about a dog driven mad after naughty boys baptize it; another about a beautiful monk with a suspiciously beautiful voice, who when challenged, reveals itself to be a demonically animated corpse, which then tumbles immediately into putrefaction.105 His wolf stories, however, have no lesson: they are incitements to wonder, collected because they are memorable, or in fact—­as early manuscript evidence suggests—­ because they record actual conversations between Caesarius and a student named Apollonius. Most notable is that the student’s story is not one of dispossession, not of the loss of humanity, nor culture, nor language: the boy has the powers of reason, but he has also picked up another way of running, and knows how to howl. He may have lost nothing but his human parochialism. A similar story, the centerpiece of my discussion, comes from the “Chronicle of the Thuringian Benedictine Monastery of Peter of Erfurt.” In 1304

66    Isolated and Feral Children a certain boy in the region of Hesse was seized. This boy, as was known afterward, and just as the boy told it himself, was taken by wolves when he was three years old and raised up wondrously. For, whatever prey the wolves snatched for food, they would take the better part and allot it to him to eat while they lay around a tree. In the time of winter and cold, they made a pit, and they put the leaves of trees and other plants in it, and placed them on the boy, surrounding him to protect him from the cold; they also compelled him to creep on hands and feet and to run with them for a long time, from which practice he imitated their speed and was able to make the greatest leaps. When he was seized, he was bound with wood to compel him to go erect in a human likeness. However, this boy often said that if it were up to him, he much preferred to live among wolves than among men. The boy was conveyed to the court of Henry, prince of Hesse, for a spectacle. [1304 Anno Domini MCCCIIII. Quidam puer in partibus Hassie est deprehensus. Hic, sicut postea cognitum est, et sicut ipse retulit, cum trium esset annorum, a lupis est captus et mirabiliter educatus. Nam, quam­cumque predam lupi pro cibo rapuerant, semper meliorem partem sumen­tes et arbori circumiacientes ipsi ad vorandum tribuebant. Tempore vero hiemis et frigoris foveam facientes, folia arborum et alias herbas imponentes, puerum superponebant, et se circumponentes, sic eum a frigore defen­debant; ipsum eciam manibus et pedibus repere cogebant et secum currere tamdiu, quod ex use eorum velocitatem imitabatur et saltus maximos faciebat. Hic deprehensus lignis circumligatis erectus ire ad humanam similitudinem cogebatur. Idem vero puer sepius dicebat se multo carius cum lupis, si in se esset, quam cum hominibus diligere conversari. Hic puer in curiam Heinrici principis Hassie pro spectaculo est allatus.106]

The “Chronicle” includes another, shorter version of what is probably the same story, dated to 1344: In 1344, a certain boy, taken by wolves in Wetterau in an estate named Eczol, who was with the wolves for twelve years in a great forest called the

Isolated and Feral Children    67 Hart. This boy was captured during winter in the snow by nobles who were in the area for hunting, and he lived for eighty years. [Quidam puer a lupis deportatus in Wederavia in una villa nobilium, que dicitur Eczol, qui puer XII annis cum lupis erat in magna silva, que dicitur vulgariter dy Hart. Hic puer isto anno tempore hyemis in nive in vanacione captus [fuerat] a nobilibus ibidem morantibus, et vixit forte ad LXXX annos.107]

One early seventeenth-­century Hessian chronicle tantalizes with an account of a child caught by hunters in 1341 and brought to the local lord; it went about on all fours, jumped unusually high, but, once taken to the castle, hid under benches, and died soon afterward because of his intolerance for human food: this is probably still another retelling of the same medieval story, retailored to suit contemporary narrative expectations.108 The display of the strange child at court anticipates the fashion for court fools, which emerged in fifteenth-­and early sixteenth-­century Germany, or could even be understood as recalling a twelfth-­century chivalric narrative, Herzog Ernst, in which the eponymous hero returns from his adventures with exotic gifts for the emperor Otto: a cyclops, a pygmy, and a sweet-­singing long-­eared human.109 But the Erfurt chronicle material—­ that is, the core chronicle, and its continuations—­offers none of its own clues for why it included these odd stories. Barring their dates, neither feral child story seems to have any particular reason for being where it is: depending on the manuscript, on either side of the Hesse event we find records of a bridge-­destroying flood, the Battle of the Golden Spurs, an archbishop’s death, a severe winter, or a poisoned noblewoman. Nor does anything else like these stories appear in the chronicles, which tend to record not marvels but catastrophic weather, political and papal conflicts, or, with depressing frequency, fourteenth-­century Christian violence against Jews, like accusations of ritual murder and Host desecration, pogroms, and forced conversions and mass suicides.110 The cultural context that helps makes sense of the Erfurt material isn’t the “Chronicle,” then, but other stories of the same period, and more general concern with how humans might be contaminated by wolves. The

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Erfurt story shares its interest in the paradigmatic human upright posture with my final feral child account, from Jacques de Vitry’s thirteenth-­ century sermon collections, in which a she-­wolf stole and suckled some children; when, however, one of the children attempted to stand upright and walk, the wolf struck him on the head with her paw, and would not allow him to walk otherwise than like the beasts on his hands and feet. [Dicitur autem quod lupa aliquando infantes rapit et nutrit. Quando autem infans se nititur erigere ut super pedes incedat, lupa pede percutit eum in capite nec permittit ut se erigat sed cum pedibus ac manibus bestialiter eat.111]

The concern with posture at least hints at the “homo erectus” topos, a theme that stretches at least from Anaxagoras (500–­428 BCE) to Freud, which holds that human bipedality is an incarnation of abstract reasoning and human dominance over quadrupedal life.112 Bartholomew the Englishman, for example, writes that human bipedality shows that “man strives for heaven, and is not like livestock obeying its stomach, with a mind fixed on the earth” (homo itaque coelum quaerat, & non tanquam pecus ventri obediens, mentum in terra figat);113 Freud would later write that when evolution set humans upright, smell gave way to sight as the dominant sense, so inaugurating “the fateful process of civilization,” in which the upright form functions as an incarnated superego.114 Oriented toward heaven, the upright posture attests to, and requires that we exercise, our supposedly unique ability to abstract ourselves from our merely local surroundings. In being a particularly optical posture, it is a material form of what pretends to be the least tactile of sensations, the one that can sense without coming into contact with what it senses. Numbness takes considerable effort or misfortune; smell, as Valerie Allen observes, gets into us;115 but all we need to do not to see is to close our eyes or look away. The traditional conceptualization of human bipedality thus allows humans—­or at any rate, upright and seeing humans—­the pretense of being naturally oriented toward heaven, fundamentally untouched by

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the world, and naturally inclined toward incorporeal abstraction, that mode of thought that pretends to step aside from the muck of the given situation to see things from nowhere. No wonder then that sight too is a particular problem in human–­ lupine encounters. A belief as old as Plato’s Republic and repeated throughout the Middle Ages held that a human would be rendered speechless if seen first by a wolf.116 In other words, if the human were made the object of a gaze, it would lose its speech, the logos, the proof of human reason. The belief is essentially a folkloric version of the philosophical tradition Derrida describes when he allows himself to recognize, as he steps naked from his shower, that his cat is looking at him: most philosophers, he remarks, “have never been seen seen by the animal,” most have taken “no account of the fact that what they call ‘animal’ can look at them, and address them from down there.”117 Most have thought of the animal as there only to be studied, to be used, to be known, and never have thought that the inequitable polarity of knowledge might reverse, or flatten out. They imagine, without saying it, that if they were caught, they would lose the logos whose exclusive possession defines them as human philosophers. Similarly, being seen first by a wolf undoes the mastery granted humans by their posture; it grants wolves a quasi-­ bipedality. The myth, then, at least has the cold comfort of knowing that someone or something must be in charge. Hierarchy stays intact as a fundamental ordering principle. But the boy, uncommitted to human mastery, is in no danger of losing it. He has allowed himself to be seen seen, and indifferent to any consequences, he has suffered nothing from it, except his ability, or desire, to walk upright. Posture matters, perhaps, but it has nothing necessarily to do with dominance, or, for that matter, language. He refuses traditions in which someone gets to be the subject and someone else the object, there to be dominated, used, and observed by the one subject that claims the rational perspective for itself. He assimilates poorly to human society not because he became irreparably animalized, but because he would prefer to be among the wolves. The story, in short, is not one of loss, but one of new communities.

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To make him one of their own, his human captors must therefore insist on compelling him to walk upright. So far as the human system is concerned, the speaking, contentedly lupine boy should not be. By training the boy for a good, upright life, the adults preserve their own, human beliefs at the same time as they rehabilitate the boy. With the wolves circumiacientes and circumponentes (lying around and surrounding) him, and then, with the humans, circumligatis (bound up), his wolf-­family probably killed, the boy is now surrounded by people who want him to be happy, on their terms. Here I draw from Ahmed’s Promise of Happi­ ness, which counters the notion of happiness as the presumptive highest good by characterizing several dominant social arrangements as “hap­pi­ ness script[s],” “straightening device[s]”118 that render some lives impossible by compelling “would-­be subject[s] to face the right way such that [they] can receive the right impressions,”119 to disorient such subjects from—­per classical models—­the lower happinesses of the body and toward the higher happinesses of the mind.120 For the Hesse child, it doesn’t quite take. He would rather be back with the wolves. His discontent provides what Ahmed calls an “unhappiness archive,” in which “the sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger, but because it might estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar,”121 in this case, the self-­satisfied happiness of being human, doing it right above a disorderly world. Reactionaries unreflectively dedicated to their community, the adult humans show themselves to be far less capable of response than the wolves. Their comparative obduracy surprises, given wolves’ infamously stubborn rapaciousness: one of Marie de France’s twelfth-­century fables, for example, uses a wolf to signify those who “cannot abandon their gluttony for any price” (ne peot lesser a nul fuer / sun surfet ne sa glutune­ rie);122 another features one unable to learn the whole alphabet, because the only word he can form is “lamb,”123 a word that starts with an A in both Latin and French. In this regard, the adult humans are far more lupine that the wolves themselves. Notably, one manuscript of the Hesse story has the child raptus (snatched), not captus, by wolves, which then

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rapuerant their prey: snatching the child is like snatching any meat, but for whatever reasons, something about this young meat strikes them differently. The wolves break with themselves by opening a new relation to humans. Under their care, the boy thrives. The wolves feed him the best food, and they shelter him from the cold by gathering leaves, by enveloping him with their bodies, by digging him a foveam. A fovea, the den, is a word also meaning “trap” or “pitfall,” one of the methods for catching wolves. They have trapped the boy by making a home for it; by capturing the boy, they have given themselves over to being trapped or caught by a new way of life. As they care for him, the wolves find that winter moves them differently. They discover how the trees and their own bodies can form a kind of clothing or living, lupine home. The Hesse story should consequently not be thought of as a narrative of the return to nature—­whatever that is—­or a regressive narrative of the emergence of the beast within. If anything, it is a story of a pliable substance, the boy, shaped contingently by whatever mode of care or attention surrounds him. Passive, he is deprehensus and captus by wolves; then deprehensus by humans, all passive forms of Latin words: most of what he experiences are things that happen to him. The wolves cogebant (compel) him to go on hands and feet, just as cogebatur (he is compelled) by his human captors to walk upright in the likeness of a human. But the wolves change too. The Erfurt tale thus argues for the cultural basis of even animal nature—­or that “culture” might better be called adaptation, if we allow “adaptation” to be impractical, excessive, never quite a perfect fit, and that adaptation’s shared work of struggle or fun cannot neatly be registered along the axes of nature and nurture, object and subject, passive and active. At the same time, the story’s attention to the boy’s need for food and shelter insists on the limits of bodily pliability.124 These limits, of what to eat, and whom to shelter, require, finally, that we take seriously what it means for a human to form a community with wolves.125 No community can be innocent; all sustain themselves through definitional practices that constitutively exclude others, waveringly marking a line between self and other. Food and eating and the recognition of who or what can be murdered, and whose death is simply a “natural”

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or “background” event, are key practices of community.126 In the Erfurt chronicle, as in medieval textuality in general, wolves are notorious anthropophages. The chronicle records an attack in 1271 in which wolves eschewed sheep and instead devoured thirty men.127 Albert the Great observes that if a wolf has eaten a human, it will want to eat more “because of the sweetness of their flesh” (propter carnis dulcedinem),128 while a fifteenth-­century hunting manual says that a wolf, having once tasted human flesh, would starve rather than eat anything else. We might be led to suspect that the meliorem partem, the “better part,” that the wolves give the boy describes not the portion size or the cut but the quality; elsewhere, I have noted that medieval anthropophagy narratives often characterize human flesh as the most delicious and restorative meat, always the “better part,” so to speak.129 The science-­oriented podcast Radiolab once interviewed Barbara Smuts about her work with baboons.130 Although a student of animal behavior, she succeeds only in annoying her objects of study until she learns to imitate their noises and postures. Only then do the baboons accept her presence; only then, so far as she can determine, do they begin to act normally. The now baboonified Smuts later finds herself—­a supposed vegetarian!—­salivating when she witnesses the troop kill and dismember a young gazelle. She describes the sensorial communion as an encounter with her early primate heritage, hence as moving backward in time, but it might be called instead a different framing of the present. It is not that the human community followed that of nonhuman primates, but rather that it coexists with them, in the heterogeneous now, and at times in the same places. Smuts did not revert, but shifted. Eating the meliorem partem, the boy likewise may have slipped into being a species traitor, not toward a “primal” self, but simply toward another one at the same time, more lupine than human. We can wonder whether the boy fled or salivated as the hunters approached. This chapter offers better ways to think about isolation and ferality: community happens in unexpected places. At the same time, community can never be innocent, just as “blurred boundaries,” that cliché of cultural criticism, should be understood not as a critical endpoint, but

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as sign that there is no natural ground for decision-­making, and that all categories, even incorrect or cruel ones, are temporary and local, but nonetheless significant and potent stabilizations.131 “Entanglement” ecocritics would do well to keep these points in mind. Haraway’s recent Staying with the Trouble insists that “Critters—­human and not—­become-­ with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding.”132 At such a level of abstraction, yes, this is true, and keeping this in mind does much to undo the sovereign fantasies of the isolation experiment and legends of feral founders; but sometimes composing and decomposing can look like the boy in the woods, happily munching on suspiciously good meat. Companionship is too pacific a model; entanglement may be too. My next two chapters consider the edibility of human flesh at length, in the context of inhumation and sky burial, to add making use of to models of “entanglement” and “community.” Here I observe only that community requires sacrifices, and so does love. When we eat, as we must, we should at least eat as the Hesse story imagines the wolves do, unelevated, amid the eaters, not neglecting to remember that what we eat had its own best part that we have taken, perhaps irrevocably, and that we, not innocent, will be taken in turn.

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[ three] Food for Worms Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy victory? —­1 Corinthians 15:54–­55

Three Ways of Thinking about Death How many ends does death have for us? The answer has long seemed easy, if depressing, or relieving: just the one. Into the “deepest pit” (Job 17:16), the dead, as one twelfth-­century poem has it, “ceciderunt in profundum ut lapides” (fall into the depth like stones).1 Death drops us into Inferno, Sheol, Tartarus, or Hades, places all topographically or at least etymologically associated with caverns or holes. Once there, we sometimes pass through to some other side, like Jonah from the whale’s gullet, to emerge into a better, undying life; or we miserably find ourselves in unending torment, whose wildest portrayal may be that of Raoul de Houdenc’s Songe d’Enfer (Dream of Hell), where “sinners are cooked in an endless array of dishes, pulverized, marinated, skewered, stuffed, larded, fried in butter and sauced with the traditional sauces of medieval cookery—­green sauce, hot sauce, Parisian sauce, Poitevin sauce, and more often than not, garlic sauce.”2 However many the roads to the end, whatever might await us on its other side, in the tradition of the Pit, there is a passage through but the one maw, and one maw only. A corner of Thomas de Quincey’s criticism offers a model for thinking about death far less singly, without the promise or threat of either a conclusion or an exit. In a note to an extended discussion of John Dryden, de Quincey counters an inept critic’s objection to Milton’s “and in the 75

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lowest deep a lower deep / still threatening to devour me opens wide.”3 How, asks the critic, could the lowest deep have another deep beneath it? De Quincey explains: “In cases of deep imaginative feeling, no phenomenon is more natural than precisely this never-­ending growth of one colossal grandeur chasing and surmounting another, or of abysses that swallowed up abysses.”4 For de Quincey, there is no one last pit, as no swallowing abyss can escape the appetite of others. Devouring continues unceasingly. I would change only the implicit solemnity or grandeur of de Quincey’s image. Abysses might well be as huge as hell, as dragons, as the sea, but they might be as minuscule as mitochondria, as the grave’s worms, as blowflies or anaerobic bacteria. They are everywhere, wherever things pass away or grow, wherever things feed other things. Everything is food, and death is at once an end and a flourishing of other appetites that will be consumed in turn. Especially from the mid-­thirteenth century on, medieval Christians were unusually interested in the edibility of human bodies. What many of us would now think of as morbid, aberrant, and smoothed out in the neoclassical memorial clichés of contemporary Western cemetery architecture, was then a de rigueur, regular confrontation with disgust. The antiseptic ends of the villains of modern big-­budget films—­more often than not, tumbling to their doom from something quite tall—­can readily be distinguished from the body horror suffered by the wicked in medieval stories: the heretic Arius lost his guts when they slid out as he sat on a toilet; the sinus cavities of the Roman emperor Vespasian swarmed with his namesake wasps until he sought the help of Christ; in the Middle English Awntyrs off Arthur (Adventures of Arthur), Guinevere’s very ghost crawled inside and out with vermin.5 This chapter proposes that such material offers itself almost automatically to ecocriticism, because it is so enthusiastically committed to humiliating our pretensions to worldly dominance and bodily integrity; and, because late medieval death art is startlingly interested in the human body as inevitable food and with death as a material event, it just as automatically answers Haraway’s call for “a wormy pile” of “humusities rather than humanities” in which “truly nothing is sterile.”6 At least in this mortal world, the medieval

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human body is not the master of nature, not a fixed boundary, but always just on this side of pullulation. Certainly, much of medieval death art is by-­the-­numbers reaffirmations of late medieval Christian asceticism, a contempt for fleshly mutability that, it need hardly be said, possesses its own ongoing force. And certainly most medieval death art aims to convince us to repudiate the flux of merely mortal existence by holding out the promise of future bodies no longer subject to appetite, either our own or those of others: death will come and wreck our bodies, but after the resurrection, we get them back, perfected, bodies relieved of all the problems of bodiment. Some medieval death art, however, offers itself up more easily to earthbound interpretations, because it offers no clear promise of bodily perfectability to those who refuse worldly delights.7 My narrow interest in this chapter is with matter like this, the earliest version of a widespread short Middle English verse: Erþe toc of erþe erþe wyþ woh, Erþe oþer erþe to þe erþe droh, Erþe leyde erþe in erþene þroh, Þo heuede erþe of erþe ynoh.8

The poem resists easy translation into modern English. Gillian Rudd renders it, with welcome hesitation, as: Earth took earth from the earth with sadness. Earth drew the other earth to the earth. Earth laid the earth in an earthen tomb. Then had earth of earth earth enough.9

Typical interpretations take “earth” as simultaneously human, flesh, and spouse, but, as Rudd observes, “all these various readings persist in avoiding the word ‘erthe’ as simply that: earth.” In Rudd’s terranean reading—­ neither a surface nor depth reading—­the poem concerns the earth’s attitude toward “mankind, that jumped up bit of clay,” which the earth, in

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sorrow and frustration, “reclaims . . . re-­absorbs and thus eradicates.”10 But we might modify this last point by stressing a simultaneous eradi­ cation and persistence: our earth may have ceased to be ours, but earth itself has not been eradicated. It continues, offering up more of itself into other bodies, which will be drawn back into it in turn, unceasingly. Understood this way, “Erþe toc of erþe” is as much a poem about process as it is about ends. That is, we can distinguish this death poem, and others like it, from the way many modern thinkers speak of death as unassimilable otherness, as a problem of identity and decision and “my irreplaceability . . . my singularity,” and therefore of my irreducible “responsibility”:11 here Derrida, writing on Heidegger and Levinas, stands in for a whole body of anxious, post-­Hegelian encounters with what is so often figured as the implacable Other of our nonexistence. For late medieval death art loved to tell humans not that death was a lonely absence, but that death made them “esca vermium” (food for worms).12 The fourth-­century theologian Ephraem of Syria directs his congregation to look into the grave to see “inde scatendem vermium colluviem” (there a mass teeming with worms).13 A millennium after Ephraem, a fifteenth-­century tale imagines a wicked young ruler reformed by peering into his father’s grave and seeing “wormes and snakes etyng opon hym”14 (worms and snakes eating him). Disgusted at what he once admired, now realizing that kings and paupers come to the same, anonymous end, the ruler commissions a painting of the corpse, which he displays on his bedroom wall as a constant reminder to disdain all worldly glory. Something has ended in all these images—­namely, our pretensions to permanent bodily integrity. But death is not an encounter with absolute nonexistence, the end of all thought, or the impossibility of the self thinking on its own nonexistence. Instead, death is shot through with a teeming, swarming mass of life, at once the cause of and effect of death. I develop this observation at length in the chapter’s remainder by examining an often-­read late Middle English poem, “A Disputation Betwyx þe Body and Wormes” (The Disputation between the Body and the Worms, hereafter Disputation), a medieval debate poem that gives voice

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both to dead flesh and the vermin that made a meal of the body.15 Because the poem is not a debate between soul and body, as so many of these kinds of poems are (because, in other words, it is soulless), it is as immanent an account of death as “Erthe toc of erþe.” But to immanence it adds a sexually charged, even sadistic interest in the flesh, a pack of talking worms, and an attempt to imagine an alliance between flesh and the worms that sprang from its own putrefaction. This chapter treats each of these elements singly: flesh, desire, and identification; then worms, both as a challenge both to a main line of critical animal theory and, in their spontaneous generation, to metaphors of vitality, animation, and liveliness; and finally, briefly, a consideration of the poem’s particular interest in the ineluctable edibility of human and other flesh. Flesh The 218-­line Disputation survives only in the British Library, Additional 37049, a much-­studied, thickly illustrated mid-­fifteenth-­century miscellany likely produced for or in a northern English charterhouse—­that is, a Carthusian monastery, and in this era, a monastic order famous for its severity.16 Medieval debate poetry includes arguments between scholars and knights, water and wine, various birds (an owl and nightingale, for example), and a great many postmortem debates between body and soul,17 but the Disputation is the only one of these latter type with a specifically female gendered body, and, to boot, certainly the only one featuring a body at odds, so to speak, with its own edibility. The poem’s action is as follows: It opens with its narrator escaping a plague and entering a church to pray. There, he encounters a new, freshly painted tomb, personalized with coats of arms and a copper plate engraved with the image of a fashionable woman.18 The narrator swoons—­ “rapt and rauesched from my selfe” (rapt and ravished from my self; 25)—­ and, in a vision, witnesses the disputation. In it, Body protests the loss of her former beauty under the violence of the “most vnkynde neghbours þat euer war wroght” (the most unnatural/improper neighbors that were ever made; 44). The worms insist that they will not leave “while þat one of þi bones with oþer wil hange” (while one of your bones still adheres

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to another; 59), because they want only to feast on flesh. When Body threatens the worms with the warriors she commanded in life, the worms mock her with a typical ubi sunt catalog of departed worthies—­Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Arthur, Dido, and others—­all of whom ended up as worm food too. The worms remind Body that she always has been infested with hungry vermin, at least implicitly hinting that simply existing means being worm food. Finally accepting the worms’ lesson on the vanity of worldly glory, Body awaits the Last Judgment, when she expects to rise again and be glorified. Then the narrator awakes and briefly informs us of the clerical imprimatur granted his vision and its subsequent versification. The Disputation has been often and correctly numbered among a host of late medieval memento mori and contemptus mundi works, which instruct people to prepare for their eventual death and to abandon the mutable and temporary pleasures of the transient world for the per­ manent rewards of heaven.19 These studies remain faithful both to the poem’s moral conclusion and to the first two of its five illustrations: the first shows the narrator kneeling before a gruesome crucifix, an image both of suffering flesh and, at least implicitly, of that flesh’s promised perfection. The gendering of corpse and visionary, one a woman, the other a man, allows for a straightforward interpretation of the poem as a whole: obviously the Disputation abjects putrefaction onto the feminized body. As is well known, the late medieval culture of celibate male clerics is just one hot zone in the long habit of male-­identified people to perform their disappointment with and superiority to the flux and interdependency of material existence by insulting women.20 Women, particularly old or laboring women, were made to emblematize the failure of all corporeal delights, all that inevitably goes awry with costume, beauty, desire, and sex. The Carthusian compilation exempts a handful of women from this scorn: the Virgin Mary and a few other holy women, like Saint Mary of Egypt, pictured with a body concealed under her own cascade of thick hair.21 Most other women, though, were made to be not bodies but flesh: if the body is ordered, neatly bounded, suitable, for example, for political metaphors (the “head” of state, and so on), flesh here

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represents the disorganized, pullulating remainder.22 Thus the poem’s Body is herself made to say that all should “avoyde fleschly temptacone” (avoid fleshly temptation; 189), so that she too, even at this late stage, has to unlearn her own attachment to her flesh, just as the poem’s presumptively male-­identified readers have to work up a horror for the fleshy existence they share with her.23 The poem’s grave is therefore the interior of a cordon sanitaire into whose horror these readers can clamber to safely explore the failures of their or any body. Given its male, Carthusian readership, the poem’s narrator, the visionary, is the reader’s obvious stand-­in, someone not yet quite a monk, perhaps still too allured by the delights of the body. The poem aims to tarnish this allure. Over the course of the Disputation, we watch his varied relationship to his own body, and the suffering bodies of others: fear, horror, and, given the right body, honor. He arrives in the poem fleeing the plague, and then worships before a lurid image of the bleeding Christ. “Ravished” into a vision, he witnesses exactly what he should loathe, another incarnated form of the mortal delights of the world he had just fled. But if the vision is to do its work, the abjection needs to be minimally enacted, with the loathing for the corpse circling back to become self-­loathing. The dynamic, in other words, is not one of simple “othering,” but rather one of dialectical identification. Elsewhere in the compilation, for example, an emperor has his pride tamed by being taken by his steward to his father’s grave. The illustration shows the moment the emperor has the tomb opened to reveal his father’s body, stinking and worm-­eaten. A banderole—­like a modern comic strip’s word balloon—­encircles the following dialogue between dead father and (temporarily) living son: Then the son said, “Horrible beasts rest with you.” The voice said, “You shall come and rest with me.” Then the son said, “Your attractive flesh falls and fades away.” “Son, so shall yours do, which is now so elegant.” [Þan sayd þe son, “Horrybil bestes restys with þe.” Þe voice sayd, “Thow sal cum and reste with me.” Þan sayd þe son, “Thy fayr flesche falls and fadys away.” “Son, so sal þine do, þat is now so gay.”24]

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Figure 3.  Emperor in tomb. Copyright The British Library Board, Add MS 37049 87r.

So long as he identifies with his father—­and he must, as the tomb’s carved figure of the dead father looks virtually identical to his son’s living body—­the son will be made to know that his vital present is just the promise of an inevitable future, even as he enjoys the temporary benefits of worldly glory. At minimum, the Disputation also requires identifi­ cation like this. But only at minimum. Assuming what we can clumsily call a dominant heterosexuality, the male-­identified visionary is supposed less to want to be what the corpse was (an emperor, for example) than he is supposed to want the body itself. “Sex,” Masha Raskolnikov

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observes, “haunt[s] the rhetoric of all Body/Soul debates,”25 but nowhere else in the tradition does the specter assume quite so material a form. Recall the famous encounter of the three living and three dead, so often illustrated in medieval art, but imagine here that the dead, with their statements of “what you are, I once was,” and so on, had once been sexually desirable to the living. This is why the Dreamer must be identified with the worms too, because they mark out a space of difference between the Dreamer and the (female) Body, so that desire can be enacted, but piously, which is to say, in this case, through loathing and punishment.26 By speaking the most orthodox lessons in ascetic disgust, the “phallic”27 worms play the part of the wise men, the angel, or the other knowing figures in other such stories. As a man, the visionary can join the crowd of Big Others in lecturing a woman about the proper, disdainful relation to the flesh, hers and his—­with full mouths. This in a Carthusian manuscript, a product of an order that was, by the fifteenth century, infamous for its fanatic vegetarianism!28 As if doubling down on the hypocrisy, the worms signal how disgusting their meal would be to anything else: “If we, as bestes, had smellyng & tastynge, / Trows þou þat we wald towche þi caryone playne? / Nay, parde, we wald it voyde for certayne!” (If we, as beasts, had the capacities to smell or taste, do you think that we would touch your bare carrion? No, by God, we would certainly vomit it out!; 69–­7 1). And, of course, the worms themselves, being unpaternally sprung from the stuff of disorganized flesh—­a point I treat in detail below in my section on spontaneous generation—­can hardly be identified only as mas­ culine figures. Escaping from desire for the woman means escaping into a host of indeterminately crawling things, whose nonhuman desires can hardly be a model for what the ascetic should be. Identification in the Disputation is a mess. Consider a comparable mess from elsewhere in the compilation. A short poem, set down a few pages before the Disputation, features a falconer who entices a restless bird to return by showing it a hunk of “rede flesche”;29 so too, it explains, does Christ draw us back, where we can join him on the “cros of penaunce” through “discrete poneyschyng of thi

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body.” Jessica Brantley dryly remarks that “the poem sets up a number of complex equivalences”:30 Christ is falconer, but also meat, while the reader is a falcon whose submission to Christ transforms him into both “meat and crucified savior.” What the Disputation adds to this tangle of identifications is sexual desire and gender transformation: the visionary has to want the woman, or someone like her, or he has at least to imagine himself superior to anyone who would have been taken in by her. He wants the ascetic lesson inflicted on her for what she and others like her make him want, but at the same time he has to know himself as her too, because unless he recognizes her body as like his own, the ouroboric lesson simply cannot take. Of course, it matters that the male visionary gets the gift of humiliation by tarrying with a rotten woman. Put bluntly, the Disputation is about a man scared of death and by change itself who draws solace and wisdom from watching a beautiful woman putrefy. In this system, she should be humiliated, because she is a woman; and if only he would understand himself correctly, he can choose to be humiliated too. The emperor of the parable comes to know that the mighty are finally brought low; the poem’s dreamer, that the attractive, but socially semi-­subaltern (given Body’s nobility) are really to be scorned, but also that, when it comes to our bodies, he is not really so different from them. The lesson is meant for all, generated from her body and her comeuppance. But when the poem ends with the dreamer telling both “Man & Woman . . . al lustes for to lefe” (men and women to leave all lusts; 215), and indeed with Body intoning “What he salbe & also what is he / Be it he or sche, be þai neuer so fayr, bewar / Of pryde” (what he shall be, and also what he is, whether it be a he or she, no matter how attractive they are, beware of pride; 184–­86), these universal lessons, for men and women both, erase the distinction between lust for the other and lust for the self that drives the poem’s weird drama. That is, the final universalization suggests that the Disputation is trying to mitigate its own weirdness; in particular, its conclusion erases how the Disputation’s story of sanctimonious retri­ bution draws its vocabulary, as Elizabeth Robertson observes, from the pastourelle poetry of rape.31 We should not forget this intertext, and the

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poem’s odd networks of desire, as we emerge from the poem. And we might look again at ecocritical writing in general, to rethink its tendency to praise flows of identity and material immanence, and to ask what bodies are made to be naturally suitable for these lessons:32 I know of no medieval death vision of a woman looking, lips tightened with disgust, into the grave of a man. Creeping Things Criticism of the Disputation almost invariably reproduces the second of the five illustrations accompanying the poem, not the kneeling visionary and the lurid crucifix, not the three images of the corpse and the gargantuan worms arguing with her, but the tomb, on whose lid is a lifelike sculpture of a well-­dressed woman, and below which is a cut-­away view of the grave itself, where worms and other vermin swarm a rotting corpse. The illustration thus resembles a fashionable late medieval “double” version of the transi, or cadaver monument.33 The top level of a typical tomb of this sort had a sculpture of the body as it appeared in the prime of life, costumed in institutional regalia or its best finery; in its lower level, the body as an emaciated corpse, naked or draped barely with a shroud, sometimes putrefying, with exposed entrails and beset with toads, snakes, crocodiles, and other vermin and anthropophages.34 English examples of such double monuments, nearly contemporary with the Disputation manuscript, include those of Bishop Richard Fleming (constructed before 1431) at Lincoln Cathedral and Henry Chichele (constructed in 1424) at Canterbury Cathedral.35 On the upper level, tombs like these display the perfected future body of the resurrection, or the entombed subject’s idealized selfhood in the pride of its worldly life; below, such tombs represent what resurrection will correct, or the fraudulence of the ideal self in our mutable world. Those who encountered double transi tombs were meant at once to admire the dead, to speed them through purgatory with their prayers, and, piously disgusted, to reflect on the fleetingness of worldly glory and their own inevitable deaths. Because of these calls to the living, tombs like these were less markers of loss than of a deadly, insistent presence. The tomb of the Disputation

Figure 4. Tomb, Disputation between the Body and the Worms. Copyright The British Library Board, Add MS 37049, 32v.

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may represent a woman in the pride of her life—­admired by her peers, feared and hated by monks, scorned by God, and now humiliated—­but she has seen fit to make advance arrangements to have herself speak, through her tomb, the most orthodox sentiments about worldly contempt. The illustration’s own monumental verse demands that we “take hede vnto my figure here abowne / And se how sumtyne I was fressche & gay / Now turned to wormes mete & corrupcone” (take heed of my figure here above, and see how I was once cheerful and joyous, now turned to worms’ food and corruption); the final lines, circled in red banderole to encourage excerpting as a sententia, or wise statement, “when þou leste wenes, venit mors te superare / when þi grafe grenes. bonum est mortis meditari” (when you least expect it, death comes and overcomes you; when the grass is green, it is good to have death in mind). Far from giving the self entirely over to death, cadaver monuments borrow the longevity of stone, brass, and engraved verse to grant humans as much perpetuity as the mortal world offers, simultaneously announcing a contempt for worldly existence while demanding the remembrance of a subject hiding behind the supposed anonymity of a corpse. Consider the following excerpt from an early fifteenth-­century verse, “My Lief Life That Livest in Wealth,” in which a corpse catalogs its decay: In mi riggeboon bredith an addir kene, Min eiyen dasewyn swithe dimme: Mi guttis rotin, myn heer is green, Mi teeth grennen swithe grymme.36 In my spine breeds a fierce adder, my failed eyes dim very much: my guts rot, my hair is green, my teeth grin so grim.

The poem’s deliquescent striptease keeps something for itself through each line’s anaphoric repetition of the possessive pronoun: “mi riggeboon,” “min eiyen,” “mi guttis,” “mi teeth.” As with cadaver monuments, hungry vermin move through the body’s flesh or rest on top of it, or they orbit it as a kind of creeping mandorla, without ever quite dispossessing

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us of our body. So focused, the vermin are as much our adjuncts as the faithful dogs of late medieval recumbent tomb sculpture, smiling and besotted at the feet of neatly human bodies. As a whole, read with all of its illustrations together, the Disputation breaks sharply from that anthropocentric model. Its remaining three illustrations show an emaciated corpse standing, its face a skull, marked as a woman by its fashionable headdress. She is not surrounded by tiny figures. Instead, she looks either up or down at four “mawkes” (maggots; 112), each as large as her limbs, occupying as much pictorial space as she does. As in the poem’s text, where the worms have eleven rhyme-­royal stanzas to the corpse’s fourteen, worms and corpse share space almost equally. The dreamer explains that the corpse and the worms are “strangly ilk one oþer corespondynge” (each one strangely alike the other; 27), each engaging the other “in maner of a dyaloge” (in the manner of a dialogue; 28). Here, surprised to be engaged in a dialogue—­or something like a dialogue—­humans have been dislodged from their presumption that theirs is the only story worth telling, and that their own death simply means the end, full stop. This and the following section explore how the Disputation’s weird encounter undermines the pieties of both critical animal theory and medieval death art: the former through its swarms of hungry creatures, whose unruliness frustrates any deliberate humiliation of human privilege, the latter through the poem’s presentation of an inescapable, immanent activity in the grave, without any obvious promise of rescue or conclusion. In the poem, Body shares life and death with the worms, amid an ongoing, impersonal creativity of a matter that, on occasion, coalesces temporarily into subjects. Observations like these would be familiar to anyone conversant in the recent posthumanism, from Stacy Alaimo to Joanna Zylinska; my particular contribution, as a medievalist, will be to explore these ideas through the “automatic” and unpaternal process of spon­ taneous generation. This famously discredited notion, treated at length in the next section, offers a way not only to account for the worms and their strange position in hierarchies of creation but also, as I’ll argue, to help us jettison metaphors of liveliness, animation, and other such

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quasi-­divine concepts, so that ecocritics, posthumanists, and their fellow travelers might arrive at a much more thoroughgoing materialism. The foundational moment for critical animal theory is Derrida’s naked encounter with his cat.37 The cat comes across Derrida just as he has emerged from the shower and, so far as Derrida thinks, looks at his penis, “without touching yet, and without biting, although that threat remains on its lips or on the tip of its tongue.” Derrida feels ashamed and a bit ashamed of his shame; he follows this by sketching the philosophical distinctions between self-­aware nudity and unwitting nakedness, and from there he dismantles the pretensions of the “carnophallogocentric” humanist tradition. To suspend, refuse, or delegitimize human supremacy, to oppose those who take “no account of the fact that what they call ‘animal’ can look at them, and address them from down there,”38 Derrida does not just look at his cat, but allows himself to linger in the uneasiness of being “seen seen” in his own cat’s eyes. He insists that his cat is not a “figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth”:39 like Derrida’s, the look is from somewhere, not impersonal, not disembodied, not abstract, and certainly without any pretense of invulnerability. With this in mind, Derrida summons Bentham’s reframing of traditional methods of weighing the relative worth of human and nonhuman lives. Typically, humans claim that nonhuman irrationality means that only humans count as ethical subjects. Bentham, however, argues that the important question is not whether nonhumans can speak, or reason, but whether they can suffer. In his reframing Derrida discovers the “nonpower at the heart of power”; it’s not that he can reason and his cat cannot, but that he and his cat both share the condition—­ crucially, not a capacity—­of being unable not to be exposed to suffering or at least to injury, a condition that is itself a subset of the general secondariness and incompleteness of any subject or concept within any play of being or categories. Whatever we can do, we all share a fundamental inability. We’re in this together. Sort of: as several other people have observed, cats are particularly useful for troubling humanism. Though Derrida insists that the cat does not “represent, like an ambassador, the immense symbolic responsibility

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with which our culture has always charged the feline race,”40 it is also a member of a cultural class—­like Derrida himself, who surely represents the immense symbolic weight of philosophical tradition. Cats are unfamiliar familiars, independent, nocturnal, clever carnivores we want to let stay with us, who kill without our supervision and often without our approval.41 Derrida follows the feline uncanniness still further: though his cat is female, he often refers to her in the masculine as chat: had he consistently called it a chatte, it might have been more obviously a vagina dentata, staring, perhaps hungrily, perhaps indifferently, at his penis, since une chatte can be, as in English, a “pussy.”42 Its uncertain or shifting gender renders it a little elusive, a little resistant to being boxed up in certain meaning. A dog would have been homier, perhaps more suited to blend itself happily with Derrida, like Haraway’s own Ms. Cayenne Pepper, whose “darter-­tongue kisses” occasion “potent transfections” of DNA between dog and academic. By contrast, the cat’s simultaneous shared vulnerability and “unsubstitutable” feline “singularity”43 make this a face-­to-­face meeting characterized by negotiation, indifference, and perhaps what could have been play, had Derrida stooped to touching his cat or, had the cat been interested, letting it touch him: Haraway’s dis­ appointment here is more than apt.44 There is just enough of a mutual threat—­the cat’s teeth, Derrida’s humanity—­and just enough mutual recognizability to establish the relation to the Other typical of the Derridean/ Levinasian ethics of infinite responsibility. But what relationship would be possible to faceless animals? Still more, to faceless, hungry animals? Medieval literature is replete with anthropophagous beasts: whales, boars, the baby dragons that suck the German hero Ortnit out through the joints of his own invulnerable armor, and so on.45 Critical animal theory that tangles with the Middle Ages must take account of this peculiar feature of its storytelling. Derrida’s room too would have swarmed with mites, spiders, and other tiny life, some of which might also have taken an interest in some part of him as he stepped naked from his shower. The question with such masses is not how we might save them from our violence but rather whether we can or should pay them any mind, or how we could count them as singularities.

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Critical animal theorists have often wished Levinas had recognized the face of the dog Bobby, one of the stars of his short piece about an animal encounter while he survived a Nazi prisoner-­of-­war camp;46 but though Levinas is particularly reluctant to recognize a snake as having a face,47 few have thought to challenge him for this too. Swarming life rarely gets much attention in analyses focused on animal rights and struggles to reduce or eliminate the cruelties of, for example, factory farming.48 It is not so easily personalized, perhaps because it is so indifferent to us and, as a mass, so irrepressible, even invulnerable, or hostile, or hungry. Among swarming life, bees, admired as “model insects,”49 are almost uniquely domesticated; in several medieval stories, when consecrated hosts find their way into hives, bees show their piety by surrounding them in waxwork Gothic cathedrals.50 But because most other swarming things were just annoyances, or worse, because, in other words, they interrupted the domination through which humans convinced themselves of their superiority, medieval champions of human difference sought desperately for some assurance that even the supposedly most insignificant forms of life had also been created for our sakes. Gervase of Tilbury’s twelfth-­ century Latin wonder collection, for example, explains that God made “cattle, the creeping things, and the beasts—­the cattle to help us, the creeping things and the beasts to challenge us—­in the last place he fashioned man.”51 By humiliating and harassing us, the creeping things remind us to fix our concentration to eternal things. That, at least, is how it should work. Gervase’s contemporary Gerald of Wales tells a story that muddles even such a stopgap explanation. There was once an ailing Welshman to whom “it seemed as if the entire local population of toads had made an agreement to go to visit.” Though his friends kill “vast numbers,” the swarm grows again “like the heads of the Hydra. . . . Toads came flocking from all directions, more and more of them, until no one could count them.” Apparently lacking a better plan, his comrades stuff their sick companion into a bag, strip a tree of most of its branches, and hoist their toad-­afflicted friend into its summit. Undaunted, the toads scale the tree and when they come back to ground, nothing of the Welshman remained “but his skeleton.”52 Fumbling for an explanation, Gerald cites

Figure 5. Worms, Disputation between the Body and the Worms. Copyright The British Library Board, Add MS 37049, 33v.

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the inscrutable judgment of God; meanwhile, down on earth, swarming life slips away entirely from the human supremacy that uneasily grounds human difference. Gerald’s toads are cousins to the worms of the Disputation. Crucially, the Disputation manuscript outfits each of its enormous worms with only a single dot that does no more than suggest an eye. Their featurelessness refuses anthropomorphic appropriation, negotiation, and the optic cliché of the “window to the soul” that promises a transcendent, extracorporeal, cherishable self. Instead, the dots are less the mark of a face than of an appetite, calling attention only to how they plan to make use of Body and their destruction of characteristic human arrogance—­namely, its unidirectional and therefore parasitic exploitation of everything else.53 When Body complains, they tell her that “þe fyrst day þow was borne our mesyngers we sende” (the first day you were born we sent our messengers; 121), commanding them Ne not departe fro þe to deth on þe went; Þe to frete & to gnawe was oure intent, And after come with þe to our regyowne, þi flesche here to hafe for þair warysowne. (124–­27) Not to leave you until death took you; to eat and gnaw you was our intention, and afterward to come with you to our region, to have your flesh here for their recompense.

Body has been reminded that “lyce or neytes in þi hede alway, / Wormes in þe handes, fleese in þe bedde” (lice or nits always [have been] in your head, worms in your hands, fleas in your bed; 131–­32). Body protests by citing scripture, “bot ȝit in the Sawter Dauid says þat alle / Sal be obedyent vnto mans calle” (but, still, in the Psalms [i.e., in Psalms 8:7–­9] David says that all shall be obedient to man’s summons; 140–­41); given Body’s growing recognition that she has been, through her whole life, an unwitting host to a world of others, the lesson can be but cold comfort. The worms counter, “Þat power dures whils man has lyfe . . . now þi lyfe is

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gone, with vs may þou not stryfe” (that power lasts only while man has life; now your life is gone and you may not struggle with us; 142, 144). Repulsed and harassed by their “gret cruelte” (great cruelty; 82) and unconquerable hunger, the corpse cannot get free. Nor could she have ever gotten free: even what little power the worms offer us in life had never quite been ours. Though undomesticated, the worms are not particularly undomestic. One source for the Disputation is the De miseria condicionis humanae (On the misery of the human condition), Pope Innocent III’s enormously popular 1195 tract on death. There he wrote, “Vivus, gignit pediculos et lumbricos; mortuus, generabit vermes et muscas” (Alive, he brings forth lice and tapeworms; dead he begets worms and flies).54 So too in the Disputation, where the worms insist that “þe fyrst day þow was borne our mesyngers we sende” (the first day you were born, we sent our messengers; 121). Notably, when the worms say that “neytes in þi hede alway” the Middle English pre­position “in” can mean either “on” or “in,” or both:55 nits, like lice, may crawl on you, but they also crawl out of you. The object of the complaint of Body, then, is Body itself and its own, dispossessive multitudinous vitality, which we encounter in a list of vermin that delights in its own bravura excessiveness: Þe cokkatrys, þe basilysk, & þe dragon, Þe lyserd, þe tortoys, þe coluber, Þe tode, þe mowdewarp, & þe scorpyon, Þe vypera, þe snake, & þe eddyr, Þe crawpaude, þe pyssemoure, & þe canker, Þe spytterd, þe mawkes, þe evet of kynde, Þe watyr leyche, & oþer ar not behynde. (107–­13)56 The cockatrice, the basilisk, and the dragon, the lizard, the tortoise, and the snake, the toad, the mole, and the scorpion, the viper, the snake, and the adder, the toad, the ant, and the crab, the spider, the maggots, and the newt, the water leech, and the others are not far behind.

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The problem in this crowd is not the relation between self and other, nor between spirit and matter, but between the matter that we claim as our own and the selfsame material processes that bring other bodies into being. We can observe, then, how readily the “food for worms” topos offers itself as both a textual prehistory to and an extension of recent frequent (and welcome) bacterial perorations in ecocriticism and speculative real­ ism. I offer two examples: The surfaces of living beings are envelopes and filters, thick regions where complex chemical transfers and reactions take place. . . . At a microlevel, it becomes impossible to tell whether the mishmash of replicating entities are rebels or parasites: inside-­outside distinctions break down.57

Jane Bennett similarly glosses an observation that “the bacteria in the human microbiome collectively possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or so in the human genome,” and so “the its outnumber the mes. In a world of vibrant matter, it is thus not enough to say that we are ‘embodied.’ We are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of biomes.”58 These statements enthusiastically recognize that so-­called individual humans are all pastures for or collaborators with swarms of other life, indifferent to our parochial illusion of solitude or self-­mastery. In what sense could we possibly dominate these multitudinous things? What could we possibly owe them, other than, perhaps, what W. H. Auden offered his microbes in his 1969 “A New Year Greeting” (“Yeasts, / Bacteria, Viruses, / Aerobics and Anaerobics: / A Very Happy New Year / to all”). What distinguishes the Disputation from these observations, so eager to release the liberal humanist subject into a crowded “sympoesis” (Hara­ way’s favored concept), is that the crowd of the Disputation’s internal others want to eat us (that they are not our essential fellow travelers) and that they are not with us but come from us. The unbenign stuff of our own dissolution, they hail us to remind us that our usness can only be

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temporary, and that the body that gives us form also belongs to uncountable others. Crawling Matter Medieval matter is perforated by a host of abysses. Isidore of Seville’s foundational medieval encyclopedia, his seventh-­century Etymologies, explains that worms “are generated in putrid meat, the mothworm in clothing, the cankerworm in vegetables, the wood-­worm in wood, and the tarmus in fat.”59 This strange vitality, the subject of this section, is life without any of the spiritual, genealogical, or reproductive qualities normally associated with the concept, life, that is, without clear distinctions between agent and object, spirit and matter, and information and form. Swarming “life,” inseparable from matter, is matter’s own ongoing creative activity. Medieval natural science held that like typically produced like, as with the following, from Basil, a fourth-­century bishop of Caeserea, a city located in what is now Turkey: Nature, once put in motion by the Divine command, traverses creation with an equal step, through birth and death, and keeps up the succession of kinds through resemblance, to the last. Nature always makes a horse succeed to a horse, a lion to a lion, an eagle to an eagle, and preserving each animal by these uninterrupted successions she transmits it to the end of all things. Animals do not see their peculiarities destroyed or effaced by any length of time; their nature, as though it had been just constituted, follows the course of ages, for ever young.60

Inherent difficulties trouble even such general claims of likeness repeated, because larvae tend not to resemble adult insects, and especially because even normative models of reproduction require the fundamental unlikeness of sexual difference.61 Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals remarks that “anyone who does not take after his parents is really in a way a monstrosity,” and that “the first beginning of this deviation is when a female is formed instead of a male, though this indeed is a necessity

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required by Nature”:62 that is, the first interruption of “uninterrupted succession” occurs with binary heterosexual reproduction. Aristotle claims that a female emerging from a female is a monstrosity; others might have identified the monster as the boy child emerging from its mother. Regardless, the larger problem is that sexual reproduction, at least among humans, is imperfect as reproduction, because it requires unlikeness. But even these difficulties often maintained some figure, the male, for example, as the primary or exclusive cause. Hence its standard designation, generatio univoca, generation from a single source, cause, or even voice (voca from vox, voice), like that of the “Divine Command.” The contrasting form of generation was generatio equivoca, generation from an ambiguous source, the typical medieval term for spontaneous generation.63 Aristotle’s natural science was the key resource, as when he spoke of some insects not derived from living parentage, but . . . generated spon­ taneously: some out of dew falling on leaves . . . others grow in decaying mud or dung; others in timber, green or dry; some in the hair of animals; some in the flesh of animals; some in excrements: and some from excrement after it has been voided, and some from excrement yet within the living animal.64

Albert the Great’s thirteenth-­century commentary on Aristotle’s work on animals makes exactly the same point: “One must respond that some animals are generated from propagation, and some from putrefaction. In those generated from putrefaction there are no members designated for generation, because they are not generated from semen.”65 Bartholo­ mew the Englishman’s fourteenth-­century encyclopedia of natural history explains that the louse is “yngendered of most, corrupt ayer and vapours þat sweten oute bitwen þe felleand the fleissch by pores” (birthed from moist, corrupt air and vapors that sweat out from between the skin and the flesh from pores), the snail in “lyme oþer of lyme and is þerfore alway foule and vnclene” (lime or of lime, and is therefore always foul and unclean), butterflies lay eggs in fruit and “bredeþ þerinne wormes

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þat comeþ of here stynkynge filþe” (breed therein worms that come of their stinking filth), fleas lay eggs without “medlyng [mixing] of male and female,” and, more generally: A worm is called “vermis” and is a beast that often is birthed from flesh and plants and often birthed from cabbage, and sometimes from putre­ faction of humors, and sometimes from mixing of male and female [i.e., sexual reproduction], and sometimes from eggs, as it occurs with scorpions, tortoises, and newts. [A worme hatte vermis and is a beste þat ofte gendreþ of fleisse and of herbes and gendreþ ofte of caule, and somtyme of corrupcioun of humours, and somtyme of medlynge of male and femele, and somtyme of eyren, as it fareþ of scorpiouns, tortuses, and euetes.66]

Sexual reproduction goes awry because of the very need for sexual difference; asexual reproduction goes awry because something happens where it ought not to, because life crawls from disorder, a living something whose swarming, verminous character can hardly be distinguished from the disorder that produced it. From the ancients through at least the end of the seventeenth century, few found the science anything but common sense. Basil the Great remarks that on hot rainy days in Thebes, hordes of field mice swarm from the earth and the “mud alone produce[s] eels; they do not proceed from an egg, nor in any other manner; it is the earth alone which gives them birth.”67 Isidore’s Etymologies just as blandly observes that “many people know from experience that bees are born from the carcasses of oxen,” hornets from horses, “drones from mules, and wasps from asses.”68 Without any expectation of disagreement, Augustine explains that Noah had no need to coax spontaneously generated lifeforms into his ark two by two, because God specifically commanded him to gather only male and female animals—­in other words, only those generated through sexual reproduction—­and anyway vermin would have infested the ark, just as they do in any house, “not in any determinate numbers.”69

Figure 6.  Creation, with a rare snake. Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program. Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. Ludwig XIII 3 1r.

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The problem was not the natural science itself but rather how spontaneous generation challenged God’s monopoly on creation. If spontaneous life comes from putrefaction, and if the created world was perfect before Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, then creeping things may have emerged only after God has finished making the world. Though creeping life, reptiles in Latin, is created in the Bible’s first creation story, in both Genesis 1:20 and 1:24, medieval artistic depictions of creation tend to omit it, an absence that perhaps acknowledges that such a form of life had yet to emerge in the earth’s first, uncorrupt days.70 No doubt the absence is partly due to technical constraints: creeping things would have been too small to illustrate easily, particularly on the sixth day of creation, crowded as it was with the creation of quadrupeds and humans. However, even the ample space of cathedrals tended to omit vermin from their creation reliefs. Who or what could be responsible for vermin? Medieval Christian thinkers offered a range of solutions, more or less convincing, to preserve a divine or at least a celestial cause for swarming life. According to Duns Scotus, stellar heat operated on a cow’s corpse, inscribing the matter in such a way that it might produce bees;71 a work ascribed to Albert the Great similarly explains that when the sun heats rotting matter, trapped heat causes vibrations within the matter, which vibrations produce spirit, and thus life.72 Albert the Great himself insists that animals sprung from putrefaction require a superior power and an inferior power. The inferior power disposes the matter for putrefaction, into which, once it has been disposed, the celestial power is introduced, operating on the matter just as sperm operates on the menses. And this is why, just as the power of the sperm disposes the menses to the form of a perfect animal, so the celestial power operates through an elemental power on matter that is disposed to the form of an imperfect animal.73

Albert’s solution suggests an effort to keep God ultimately responsible, in this case through a deputized virtus caelestis, a heavenly patriarchal force, working, like God, on merely receptive, feminine sublunary matter. The

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most widely repeated resolution to the problem belongs to Augustine’s On the Holy Trinity. In the course of examining the competing serpent-­ creating miracles between Moses and the magicians of pharaoh’s court (Exodus 7:10–­12), Augustine explains that demons have no power to create matter, and neither, in fact, does anything else but God. Rather, during Creation God had “interwoven” a “natural seminal power” in all life from which they produced particular kinds of seemingly new things74 (elsewhere, in a Genesis commentary, he suggests that these seeds might have been implanted on the third day, along with the seeds of plants).75 Though putrefaction had yet to happen at Eden’s creation, seemingly spontaneous life has already been provided for by God’s foresight. All these explanations sought to keep God ultimately responsible and, through that, to preserve hierarchies between object and agent, matter and spirit, and the host of other inequitable distinctions these divisions attach themselves to, like paternal form and feminine matter. The stakes of the problem become even clearer in the waning days of spontaneous generation, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. The typical story is one that culminates in Louis Pasteur’s conclusive demonstration that a sufficiently sterile environment would prevent even the smallest microbes from arising, and with that, a conclusive demonstration that things in themselves have no power to bring forth something new. The counternarrative is perhaps equally familiar: some thirty years ago, the story of the death of spontaneous generation became a key site for the social history of knowledge, in which the victory of Pasteur over Felix Archimede Pouchet could be understood not simply as the rise and triumph of experimental science over ancient superstition but instead, or at least also, as a victory of Pasteur’s Catholicism and Imperial sympathies over Pouchet’s Protestant Republicanism, differences that themselves correspond to two distinctive understandings of what matter can do.76 In 1864 Pasteur denounced spontaneous generation as an ally of atheism: “What a triumph, gentlemen, it would be for materialism if it could affirm that it rests on the established fact of matter organizing itself, taking on life of itself.”77 In the same year, Pasteur again argued:

102    Food for Worms If we also granted matter this other force we call life, life in all its many manifestations, varying as it does according to the conditions under which it is encountered, what would be more natural but to deify it? What could then be gained from recourse to the notion of an original creation, to whose mystery we must defer? What use the idea of a divine Creator?78

Roughly 180 years earlier, Ralph Cudworth’s massive True Intellectual System of the Universe had made exactly the same point without feeling compelled to don scientific costume: “To assert . . . that all the effects of nature come to pass by material and mechanical necessity, or the mere fortuitous motion of matter, without any guidance or direction, is a thing no less irrational than it is impious and atheistical.”79 To preserve reason, which, for both Pasteur and Cudworth, is much the same thing as preserving God, matter must be dependent, ultimately, on some divine or quasi-­divine monopoly on a final creative power. Pasteur, the modern scientist, has more than a little in common with his medieval predecessors. As usual, the defense of divine powers was also a defense of human particularity. Cudworth’s late seventeenth-­century contemporaries Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Jan Swammerdam provide a surprising example of such a motivation in response to their microscopic examinations of insects. In this little world they discovered an astonishing richness of detail, especially in insect wings.80 They were astonished because of traditions inherited from Aristotle and Albert the Great that held that the more perfect an animal, the more differentiated its parts. But if such beauty could arise from merely material processes, by the work of filth upon itself, then other complex creatures—­humans, in particular—­could ultimately arise in just the same way. Leeuwenhoek and Swammerdam thus needed to align insect reproduction with what they believed to be the typical, sexual modes of animal reproduction. Recognizing the centrality of human dignity to their research helps explain why these and other seventeenth-­century natural scientists were so dedicated to defending the doctrine of bodily resurrection,81 for if human life, like swarming life, could just arise from natural processes, what spirit could persist after our bodies returned to the swarming earth? Resurrection promises

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a release from mundane flux, while a spontaneously generated soul forces us to recognize the impossibility of escaping from this or any other earth. Speculations like these had a history that ran further back than the seventeenth century. One such speculator was Blaise of Parma (c. 1347–­ 1416), whose Quaestiones de anima (Questions on the soul) formulates a “materialistic concept of the soul.”82 Alternately known as Blasius, Biagio Pelacini da Parma, or, to his enemies, as the “Doctor Diabolicus,” his present fame, such as it is, rests largely on his work on optics and weights.83 His optical theories led him to argue that intellection was a form of sense perception, and since sense perception requires a distinct object, but available to perception, so too did the intellect; and since the objects of the senses are material, so too are the objects of intellection, that is, thought. The conclusion led him to this astonishing last point: “Quod anima intellectiva hominis sit educta de potentia materiae generabilis et corruptibilis, habet quilibet de plano concedere” (that the human intellec­ tion comes from the potentiality of matter, gen­erable and corruptible).84 Human reason here is an effect of ongoing and necessarily imperfect material processes. Blaise reached similar conclusions in considering the problem of spontaneous generation. Agreeing with Avicenna rather than Aristotle, he argued that not just gnats, bees, mice, toads, and the like could emerge spontaneously, but all life could, including human life, for “nihil ergo prohibet quin materia illa, sic prae­parata ex puris naturalibus, non recipiat formam quae habebit virtutem discernendi, sillogizandi etc., quae a vulgaribus intellectiva nominator” (nothing prevents this matter, so prepared by natural causes, from receiving a form which has the capacity to discern, to reason, and so on, which is commonly called the “intellective power”).85 And thus immortality and separability, key features of the rational soul, disappear. Blaise was eventually forced to recant these views, which included an argument that the story of Noah’s Ark was just a myth, unnecessary, given that the post­diluvian world would have given rise again to the life that had once inhabited it.86 In Blaise we can observe a process that produced souls of all sorts in the same way that minerals were thought to be, through an interaction between earth and sky.87 All life, vermin, human, and otherwise, could

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be produced naturally, through a nonmiraculous interaction between a mobile earth and a mobile sky. Life here is not something added to matter, but just one of the things matter does. And looking ahead from Leeuwenhoek and Swammerdam into modern science, we now must recognize that all generation is spontaneous if tracked back far enough. Darwin himself made the admission in a letter written not long before Pasteur was celebrating his victory over Pouchet, when he recognized that life must be at its origin abiogenetic.88 To put all this another way: at the very moment spontaneous generation was giving way to modern science, abiogenesis returned, with what we call life aimlessly generated by the impersonal, restless creativity of nonlife. Of course, the differences between spontaneous generation and origin-­ of-­life research should not be obscured or dashed past.89 Origin-­of-­life research hypothesizes about the development of a paired genetic continuity and openness to adaptation across generations; it provides irreversible historical narratives, with key transitional points, of the long rise of DNA out of an RNA world; and it tends to insist that the time of abio­ gensis is long over, at least on Earth. Life requires at least a combination of both genetic continuity and an openness to the environment that allows for adaptation—­which is to say, life requires cross-­generational genetic continuity and discontinuity. Spontaneous generation by contrast is discontinuous, as much a closed loop in its own way as pre-­Darwinian assertions that like always produces like: filth produces flies, the flies die and return to filth, and so on. And unlike origin-­of-­life research, spontaneous generation may be inscrutable but it does not relegate its processes to the great temporal distances of the hundred-­million-­year rise of DNA out of RNA or to the great speed of chemical reactions occurring in a millionth of a second. Spontaneous generation happens right before us, though, of course, it does not actually happen, as we now know. Yet over the long time of life, matter still swarms in mundane and perhaps inevitable ways that require no transcendent divine catalyst, or any supposedly atheological equivalent, to get going. The campaign against spontaneous generation and the various incongruent, profane materialisms must therefore be understood as something

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other than that of a modern split from medieval habits. We should draw a line not between medieval superstition and modern science but rather between acceptances of material immanence and a faith in immaterial transcendence, and, by extension, a belief in clear lines between decisive agents and mere objects. The border between immanence and transcendence must be understood as grammatical, per Nietzsche’s famous critique in Twilight of the Idols of “the metaphysics of language,” which, he argues, persists in differentiating between a “doer and doing” and asserting some “will as the cause” or, more simply, classifying things into clear subjects and predicates, between a matter that needs something or someone to make it happen and matter whose operations cannot be neatly sorted into effect and external cause, object and external subject. The end of Nietzsche’s critique is well known: “I am afraid that we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.”90 In short, spontaneous generation is godless, because it is ungrammatical. Vermin swarm from and in matter without any sexual intermediary, without parental transmission, without a singular cause or singular voice, without a quality separable from their temporary affiliations. Vermin then return to earth, possibly to arise again at some point if conditions are right, but possibly not. If this stuff is life, it must be life completely immanent to its temporary ordering of stuff, without any of the informational, transcendent, and spiritual implications that “life” carries, and without any split between its particular manifestation and a transcendent “life principle.”91 If body is not distinguished from the effects bringing it into being, then we have the tools for a radically nonspiritual, nonpaternal, and nonvital conceptualization of living things. Body here is not origin or ground or prediscursive repressed matter.92 Individuation now need not be something that happens through the application of spirit, or vitality, or writing, or code to matter. It can be understood to happen with matter itself, through its organization within a roiling field of other matter.93 Spontaneous generation and swarming life help us imagine what life looks like without a soul, or, to put it another way, what the soul looks like without any principle of separation, and therefore, without any obvious

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way to value the body by enlivening it, or to devalue it by declaring it merely inert. Perhaps unsurprisingly, so does the Disputation. Typical medieval death poetry tends to split body from soul, and sets each to arguing with the other over which should be blamed for the infernal or purgatorial plight the self has fallen into: “Nou is mon hol and soint” (Now is Man Whole and Sound) has soul blame the body for not fasting on Fridays, not giving alms on Saturday, and not attending church on Sundays. “In a þestri stude I stod” (In a Dark State I Stood) has soul begin with the contemptuous “Wo worþe þi fleis, þi foule blod, wi liggest þou nou here” (Woe betide your flesh, your foul blood, why do you lie here?), an anger that soul unrelentingly maintains until its final prophetic flourish, an eschatological sequence of the world’s terrifying last seven days that concludes with Christ’s return. “Als I lay in winteris nyt” (As I Lay in Winter’s Night), whose 624 lines give Body space to fight back against Soul’s pious sarcasm (here soul’s “þi foule blod” [your foul blood] is met with body’s “if þou hast schame & gret despite, / Al it is þine owhen gilt” (if you have shame and great disdain / it is entirely your own fault]).94 And the Disputation compilation has its own Body versus Soul debate, excerpted at length from the Middle English translation of Guillaume de Deguileville’s fourteenth-­century Le pèlerinage de l’âme (The Pilgrimage of the Soul).95 The work is perhaps most striking for its practical concern with the science of putrefaction (noble things, Soul explains, smell worse when they rot);96 eventually, an angelic mediator repairs the disunion of soul and body that both death and the debate had split apart. In the Disputation, however, there is no soul, nothing that could be identi­fied as having any permanence. If the poem provides no soul, we need not furnish it with one.97 If fifteenth-­century “context” is needed to authorize my observation, the simplest explanation is that the lady had once had a soul, and that by the time the poem begins, it has already left, either to heaven, hell, or what is more expected in this period, purgatory, and that what we witness in the debate is what is left over, in the period between death and the soul’s return to a recreated body in the Last Judgment. What remains is Body. As a named character with motives and a voice, Body has everything a literary work typically needs for a personality.

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With all this, and with its claims to ownership of flesh and bones, we might say that Body plays the part of Soul, but immanently rather than transcendently, by a voice that just marks out the place where the self can be located for a while within the always shifting materiality it shares with the worms. If we locate the soul in the function it plays in other poems in the tradition, as the voice of moral and doctrinal authority, then the worms may be the poem’s soul, with a crucial, obvious distinction: they are not the self, nor, as a crowd, even a self, and as nonhuman life, they are certainly, for better or worse, not destined for eternity. We need not imagine that any of these voices emanate from some spiritual immateriality, some promise of transcendence, some separation of agential self from the objectified matter it inhabits and moves. This is all to say, despite the tendency of even modern critics to persist in using metaphors of “vitality” and “animation” to describe the character of “agency,” the poem presents disanimated, corporeal selves, aware of themselves as selves, of course, but without any principle of separation that would rescue the self from being an object for others. What the soullessness of the Disputation presents, then, is an almost unimaginable immanent selfhood, but one that suffers from a capacity often ignored in accounts of impersonal life, “composting,” and other ecocritical, posthumanist philosophy—­namely, the capacity to die, which it gives voice to, impossibly, from the other side of death. Nor, finally, must we apprehend the heterogeneous immanent selfhood of the Disputation as chaotic or repulsive. There is no need to go along with Georges Bataille, whose exploration of human limits delighted in the “prodigality of life,” “the slimy menace of death,” and our anguish over “that nauseous, rank, and heaving matter, frightful to look upon, a ferment of life, teeming with worms, grubs, and eggs.”98 To apprehend the heaving stuff of worms and body as repulsive is to view things only as ourselves and our own imagined order. It is to see things from the side of God or of masculine certainties about the perfect body. It is to place ourselves and our counterparts on the side of life with politics and a face, as if we, at least, are echoes of God’s primordial commandment,

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preserving the proper paternal traditions of Creation through our well-­ ordered but threatened bodies, and to relegate everything else to the side of mere being. We could do better by recognizing the following: fundamental dis­order is not a problem particular to vermin but rather one general to all that is; to call it disorder rather than, for example, “endless generativity,” is to continue to think too highly of ourselves; we ourselves and our worldly counterparts are also immanent to material vibrancy or constantly erupting disorder; we are therefore not alive so long as “being alive” means having some escape from presumptively inert, “dead,” or uncreative materiality; the opposition of life–­death, with fertility on the side of life and sterility on that of death, is insupportable;99 and vibrancy will always swarm forth from the putrefaction, exhaustion, failure, or, for that matter, the ineluctable instability of matter, to try to sustain its own new, temporary order, and it will continue to do so long past anything we can imagine is past the point of caring. This is what Body in the Disputation meets in the grave; these are what offer her friendship. Coda: Everything Is Food, or Making Friends with Your Abyss Body eventually concurs with the worms’ paraphrase of Proverbs 31:30 (“Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: the woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised”) and then turns to us to insist that we “avoyde fleschly temptacone” (189); finally accepting the filth and her dissolution, she then waits the coming resurrection. Nothing could be more humanist than believing in the coming realization of an unchanging, invul­ nerable life, freed from all worldly entanglements or responsibilities. But then, the body addresses the worms: “Lat vs be frendes at þis sodayn brayed / Neghbours and luf as before we gan do / Let vs kys and dwell to gedyr euermore” (Let us be friends after this unexpected commotion; let us be neighbors and love as we did before. Let us kiss and dwell together forever; 194–­96). A beautiful sentiment, one we might hear as addressed to her own microbial multiplicity, but one also ruined by the contract’s fine print: “to þat God wil þat I sal agayn vpryse / At þe day of

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dome before þe hye justyse, / With þe body glorified to be” (until God wills that I shall rise again, on Judgment Day, to be called before his justice with a glorified body; 197–­99). Humanism reasserts itself with her expectation of being rescued from the worms, vulnerability, or any other worldly entanglement. Yet this reassertion of humanism works only if we ignore the “euermore,” or twist it into meaning “until things improve.” We might as well, then, ignore the poem’s promise of rescue, attending primarily or even exclusively to the poem’s bodily present, which is precisely about the body coming to realize that no rescue is coming, except, perhaps, at some almost unimaginable future point. Here, in the grave as in life, the “euermore” must be understood as promising a perpetuity entirely different from the coming celestial stasis. It cannot refer to the bodies of corpse and worms themselves. The corpse’s matter will go on, while the corpse itself will soon lose its self-­consistency to the worm’s mouths. The worms and other vermin, constitutively vulnerable like anything else, have no better claim to endurance; they too will feed something, and be passed on. The process could stop once everything reverts to dust, but to get to this arid formlessness, everything must be ashes, and all appetites must have ended: in this world, at least, an impossibility. “Euermore” might be heard, then, as characterizing not an impossible bodily persistence but rather the activity of corpse and worms dwelling together. They are mattering together in an activity that will continue regardless of her hope for an end to it. To dwell with worms, to kiss them and be friends, means to recognize oneself as constitutively enmeshed in unending cycles of appetite, while also making do in the time and matter we can claim as our own, inevitably shared with others. In friendship, the corpse gives herself up to what has always had her. She offers herself to what would have taken her anyway. In so doing, she accepts what we might take as the final lessons of medieval death poetry, one that operates by requiring that the male-­identified viewer recognize the being he shares with this woman and her worms in a grave that respects no worldly hierarchy. He must come to know that nothing, not his humanity, not his gender, not his wealth, not his beauty nor his performance of

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scorn for beauty, will let him “outsource” his vulnerability, and that his appetites and desires, human and otherwise, will be humbled by the appetites and desires of others. Amid these appetites, vulnerable and hungry, he should never forget the use that will be made of him, and the strange, often unpleasant communities that form around matter’s irrepressible usefulness.

[ four] Food for Birds The ceremonial burial of the dead may predate the emergence of our species; specific places set aside for the practice—­cemeteries, that is—­ long predate the invention even of writing.1 Medieval Christians therefore had a long pedigree in their preference for inhuming their dead, flesh still on bone, ideally near or even in some church, shrine, or other holy site. The ritual has a distant analog in ancient Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, where burial gave the spirit rest and provided for continuing rites of care, and helped a family or larger community constitute itself by seeding the ground with its dead, suffusing a place with memory.2 That said, for a medieval Christian, inhumation or indeed any other funeral ritual could be technically unnecessary. Augustine of Hippo’s early fifth-­century The Care to Be Taken for the Dead arrives at its conclusion in response to a letter from the Italian bishop Paulinus of Nola, who wondered about the advantages of burying Christians near the shrines of saints (and, by extension, about the doctrinal validity of promoting the social and financial power of shrines—­and their keepers—­by encouraging powerful patrons to inter their loved ones near them). The object of concern for Augustine’s treatise is notably the mortuis, “the dead,” rather than cadaveribus, “corpses,” as the latter certainly require no particular care from us. Amid his arguments, Augustine repeats a story from Eusebius’s History of the Church on the second-­century martyrs of Lyon: their bodies were thrown to dogs, then cut to pieces and exposed for six days before finally being incinerated and cast into the Rhône.3 Obviously, the Lyonese persecutors thought they were doing something 111

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awful, but even Christians—­who should have taken comfort in the promise of bodily resurrection—­found what happened horrible to think upon, “because each one naturally loves his own flesh.”4 Augustine’s comfort is his insistence that our dead, only apparently injured flesh can suffer no lasting harm: at the resurrection, God will rejoin our souls with our own, repaired bodies, recovering our material remains from the stomachs of animals, from burning, and from the “most secret region where the dissolved bodies have gone.”5 Nor is there any need to worry about even the mortuis: these “dead” are not our bodies, not quite, but rather our immortal souls, separated temporarily from our bodies by death, and now irrepressibly persistent. Human death is not nonexistence, but another mode of existence, an invulnerable one, aloof from, because ignorant of, all mortal concerns. For if the dead were generally aware of what was happening in the mortal world, it would have been of no benefit for King Josias to die early so that his “eyes may not see all the evils” (2 Kings 22:20) soon to be visited upon his apostate realm. And if the dead could communicate with the mortal world, Augustine’s mother, so devoted to him in life, would hardly stand by indifferently during Augustine’s own times of sorrows.6 It may be, explains Augustine, that the dead benefit in some way from the prayers we offer them, regardless of whether they are near a shrine or not, but they benefit only if they are already capable of being blessed. Not that they would know or care: they are now in their own world, and, barring rare miracles, know nothing anymore of ours, unless the more recently deceased are allowed to pass on news. We, not they, are the ones that benefit: for the burial (“humando,” covering with earth) is an “office of humanity” (humanitatis officium) that is “in some sort of way” (quadammodo) a witness of the belief in the resurrection of the body.7 And care in burial and prayer at well-­situated gravesites inspires in us a praiseworthy attitude of piety. What is required is a pious performance or habituation, attesting to our inevitable membership in the ranks of unwitting dead. Medieval Europe far overshot Augustine’s cautious approach to funeral rites, with burial becoming a key duty of mutual support between

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believers. In 797 Charlemagne established a foundation for the burial of strangers, whether rich or poor, noble or not.8 A ninth-­century cartulary underscores human difference from other fleshly life with a pun on the “humane inhumation” (humanitatis causa humaverit) of the indigent, “so that they are not polluted by pigs, nor torn by beasts or dogs” (ut neque a porcis inquinetur nec a bestiis seu canibus laceretur).9 And Gerald of Wales’s twelfth-­century life of Hugh of Avalon, Bishop of Lincoln, often emphasizes his solicitude for the unburied, even as other urgent, secular duties call to him. Once, following the massacres of the Jews at the coronation of Richard I, Hugh encounters an exposed corpse as he rides to Westminster. Once he determined that the deceased had been a Christian, he has a new shroud purchased, improvises a funeral party from his own retinue, and enacts a funeral with all due ceremony.10 By the later Middle Ages, the burial of the human corpses of one’s own coreligionists would become key to Christian ecclesiastical economies, while urban lay guilds would form what were in effect mutual “burial clubs.”11 Even heretics and suicides were typically interred, albeit often outside consecrated ground. In short, human bodies, of whatever sort, and however misguided their lives, were to be kept from any visible consumption by animals, and kept not just in the earth, but in places of consecrated and protected, which is to say, supervised earth, where the security of the corpse could be assured. In the twelfth-­century Song of Roland, as the Battle of Roncesvalles sours for the Christians, the fighting Archbishop Turpin begs Roland to sound his horn to summon Charlemagne’s reinforcements: though all are certain to die before rescue arrives, at least Charlemagne can take their bodies away and bury them in churches, where “neither wolf nor pig nor dog will eat of us” ( n’en mangerunt ne lu ne porc ne chen; 1751).12 Thomas of Kent tells how Alexander the Great, before burying the assassinated Darius, took the extra step of honoring his foe by “having his viscera burned, to keep pigs from eating them” (font arder la boele qe ne la manguent pors; century 3712),13 while Thomas of Cantimpré’s sprawling thirteenth-­ exempla collection, The Book of Bees, illustrates why such precautions

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might be necessary: there, invisible, grunting pigs invaded a monastery, broke into the sepulcher of a wicked man, and scattered his guts about the cloister.14 Burial may be an act of piety, it may be an act of care for the indifferent dead that benefits only us, but while medieval writers were generally aware, and even obsessively fascinated by the verminous appetites our bodies endured in the grave, they still tended to think that the deliberate abandonment of human corpses to the open-­air appetites of larger animals could be nothing but a humiliation, either of the corpses themselves or any possible honor due the memory of the dead. This chapter is about what happens when an inhumation culture encountered cultures that deliberately exposed their dead to be eaten or, perhaps more technically, excarnated by birds or dogs. Knowledge of these practices provided a way for medieval people to imagine bodily possession and bodily dissolution differently, so that the body’s inherent edibility, and its participation in material flux and nonhuman vulnerability, might be thought of as something other than humiliation. The enormously popular Book of John Mandeville, a fourteenth-­century travel compendium, includes a description of a funeral practice commonly known as sky burial: the exposure of dismembered corpses to be eaten by birds. Notably, Mandeville never condemns the practice. In reading such accounts of sky burial, in viewing the hundreds of illustrations in manuscripts and early print—­ for European arts and writing represented it with astonishing frequency from the thirteenth century on—­medieval Europeans could recognize how bodies could be bodies beloved by their human communities, deserving their care and love, while also being material belonging to the wider, shifting world; and they could recognize that the practice was not simply an innocent “return to nature,” as sky burial is sometimes portrayed by modern ecological practitioners. For in the late medieval records, the split was not between a subjective, community of care and an objective, “natural” utility, but between one subjective community and another, one human, one avian. Funerary exposure has been practiced by many cultures, worldwide. The Mandan of what is now North Dakota wrapped their dead tightly

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in buffalo skin and then placed them in tree platforms: when the platforms finally collapsed, the bones would be buried, and the skulls placed in a circle with other skulls in a sacred place;15 pre-­Christian Estonians may have also practiced tree exposure;16 some ancient Japanese practiced “wind funerals” in which they wrapped the body in a mat and left it on a mountainside, and then returned later to gather and bury the bones;17 the Kalash of Northern Pakistan place their dead in lidded wooden coffins, but leave the coffins themselves aboveground;18 some Neolithic British groups may have practiced corpse exposure, whose bones they buried after canids—­dogs or wolves—­had eaten the flesh.19 The oldest record of “sky burial” may be those depicted in an obelisk carving at Göbekli Tepe (or Göbeklitepe) and paintings at Çatal Höyü (or Çatalhöyük), both in modern-­day Turkey, each inhabited for some two thousand years, the former abandoned some ten thousand, the latter seven thousand years ago; each site features depictions of vultures soaring over or fluttering about headless human corpses, which could represent mili­ tary defeat (or victory), or perhaps even funerary rituals.20 Different meanings may underlie all these practices, from the preliterate art of Turkey to the present day: Caroline Walker Bynum warns against the “tyranny of morphology,” which would hold that similar cultural functions underlie similar representations, gestures, and even behavior practiced by disparate cultures.21 Nonetheless, recognizing how often funerary exposure has been practiced helps counter the notion that inhumation or cremation of enfleshed bodies is normative, and exposure an aberration. Furthermore, the worldwide popularity of exposure of the dead outside the Himalayan plateau counters the notion that Tibetans, for example, expose their dead only because they lack timber for burning corpses or soft earth for digging: even putting aside the fact that Tibetans practice several kinds of funerary rites, including cremation, we ought to resist any vulgar ecological reduction, as if all cultural practices were at their root only practical accommodation with the limitations of any given environment. Classical Greek and Roman ethnography and geography provide our earliest written records of such practices, with notice given to cultures stretching from the Caspian Sea and Caucasus through Mesopotamia

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and perhaps even as far as the Indus—­the Scythians, Bactrians, Hyrcanians, Massagetae, and others.22 Greeks and Romans showed sufficient familiarity with the practices to turn cultural variations into a joke: Dioge­ nes the Cynic, imagining what would happen to his corpse if left unburied, remarked that he would still have a funeral, for “if dogs tore apart his body, he would have a Hyrcanian funeral; if Vultures, Iberian” (si canes cadaver suum dilacerarent, Hyrcanam fore sepulturam; si vultures Iberam).23 The most famous of such rituals were found among the Zoroastrian Achaemenids, Parthians, and Sassanids of what is now Iran. The varying responses to the rituals in Greek and Latin classical writing can be divided into three groups: the ethnographic and apparently neutral, which list these customs in the same tone as they list geographic features; the disgusted, which present the practice as barbaric or even primitive; and finally, the cosmopolitan, which understand the practice as simply another way to mourn, no less valid than fleshly inhumation. It is this last group that most fully engages with the possibilities that come from recognizing the human body, in life and death, as at once material and cultural, meriting care, but also as belonging to appetites and uses that will inevitable turn us to their own ends. The oldest, most incontrovertible reference to exhumation comes from the fifth-­century BCE Greek historical writings of Herodotus: But there are other matters concerning the dead which are secretly and obscurely told—­how the dead bodies of Persians are not buried before they have been mangled by bird or dog. That this is the way of the Magians I know for a certainty; for they do not conceal the practice. But this is certain, that before the Persians bury the body in earth they embalm it in wax.24

Herodotus belongs to the first, nonjudgmental, group, but his account is otherwise more than a little confused (one scholar calls it “desperate”25): either the practice is secret or not; and corpses are left out to be dragged or torn into pieces (helkousthei / ἑλκυσθῇ), but not so much that it ruins them for subsequent embalming and burial. Herodotus may record in a highly compressed way Zoroastrian burial methods in all their variety,

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as the famous exposure of bodies in free-­standing dakhma, “towers of silence”—­themselves perhaps developed no earlier than the ninth century AD—­were used along with cliffside and other tomb structures of ancient Iran.26 And in Herodotus’s day, to realize the particular goal of Zoroastrian funerals—­which was to keep the decomposing corpse free from contact with visible plant life and damp earth—­other methods could be used: swathing the corpse in wax, for example, or letting dogs or birds consume the flesh of a corpse staked to dry, bare ground. Strabo’s Geography (before 23 CE) belongs to the second, horrified group of ethnographers. He observes that the Magi “smear the bodies of the dead with wax before they bury them, though they do not bury them but leave their bodies to be eaten by birds”; he then adds that they, “by ancestral custom, consort even with their mothers”: one form of dis­ respect for the care due family apparently leads inevitably to another. He explains that the Caspians starve and expose people over seventy years old, abandoning them on, or even strapping them to, desert biers, watching from a distance, and considering them blessed if—­and only if—­these hapless elderly are attacked by wild dogs or birds. And, citing Onesicritus, a historian who traveled with Alexander the Great, Strabo imagines that the Bactrians keep dogs expressly to kill their aged and sick, adding a description that, in essence, imagines the Bactrian cities as necropoles: “While the land outside the walls of the metropolis of the Bactrians looks clean, yet most of the land inside the walls is full of human bones.”27 The third-­century Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry is horrified too, although in a surprising register: while some people are meat-­eaters, or parent-­eaters, or even parent-­exposers, like the Bactrians and Scythians, philosophers at least need not behave like this.28 Similarly, Plutarch (d. 120) lists sky burial along with sati and other funereal practices he thinks unusual; he counts these all as misfortunes of no importance for no one who is not “unmanly and irrational.”29 And the Preparation for the Gospel by the third-­century historian Eusebius anticipates the colonial missionaries of modernity when he argues that the conversion to Christianity corrects these terrible practices, for the pagans no longer “throw their dead to dogs or birds . . . because these things, and numberless other similar

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practices, are the customs that defiled human existence”;30 Theodoret of Cyrus’s fifth-­century A Cure for Pagan Maladies is similarly content that Persian converts to Christianity now bury the dead;31 while Procopius’s sixth-­century Persian Wars speaks of these conflicts in a political rather than moral register, when a Georgian Christian king refuses a Persian command to follow their funeral customs by switching his allegiance to the Byzantines.32 The final group, the cosmopolitans, includes Cicero’s first-­century BCE Tusculan Disputations,33 the skeptic Sextus Empiricus’s second-­ century Outlines of Pyrrhonism,34 and Jerome’s Against Jovinian, written in 393, which, after arguing that all dietary preferences are only local to particular cultures, observes that the same can be said of care for the dead: The Tibareni crucify those whom they have loved before when they have grown old. The Hyrcani throw them out half alive to the birds and dogs: the Caspians leave them dead for the same beasts. The Scythians bury alive with the remains of the dead those who were beloved of the deceased. The Bactrians throw their old men to dogs which they rear for the very purpose, and when Stasanor, Alexander’s general, wished to correct the practice, he almost lost his province.

Jerome concludes with an argument that would also be used in Montaigne’s “On Cannibals”: “You see clearly then that not only in eating, but also in burial, in wedlock, and in every department of life, each people follows its own practice and peculiar usages, and takes that for the law of nature which is most familiar to it.”35 The Book of the Law of the Countries, written by pupils of the Syriac gnostic Bardesanes (d. 222; in Syrian, Bar Dayṣān), and the Recognitions of Pseudo-­Clementine argue that worldwide cultural heterogeneity is evidence of human freedom and against the compulsion of the stars.36 Perhaps the most surprising examples of the “cultural variation topos” appear in Byzantine hagiog­ raphy. When Saint Ia is martyred, her corpse is left to be eaten by birds, but not, surprisingly, as an insult; rather, she is simply being granted

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Persian funeral rites, a Christian saint honored with local customs.37 Agathias’s sixth-­century Histories has a similar story in a more fabulous register. Several Byzantines come across an exposed corpse in territory newly captured from the Persians. Piously, they bury it, and then at night, they dream of an old, dignified man, garbed and bearded like a philosopher, who rebukes them for stuffing a corpse into Mother Earth. In the morning they find the corpse lying atop the grave, evicted by the insulted soil. And there they leave it.38 Few of these early accounts of exposure from inhumation cultures imagine the burial that would often follow excarnation. An only partial imagination of these “foreign rites” really does render these practices sky burials; they imagine rituals that have abandoned the attempts of inhumation to make permanent, individual claims over space. For the cosmopolitan writers, their mistaken understanding of the ritual itself lets them imagine other ways of relating to the world through exhumation. Through the edible body, they can recognize that our bodies can belong to us and our loved ones but also ultimately to the nonhuman world too, without loss of either dignity or the culture that coalesces when we attend to our dead. That is, the very incomplete representations of these rituals recognize that although all bodies are only temporary, even our temporary bodies are still our homes, worthy of our love, care, mourning, and even hospitality. Through their responses, these writers counter a longstanding philosophical and religious habit of scorning all merely temporary things; though the body is mutable, and made of stuff that will be put to use by others, it still needs care; for what is ours for just a while had been ours for all that, and that brief time we have is sufficient cause for love. The Later Middle Ages Virtually none of this ethnography would have been known to medieval Latin Christendom. Early Latin accounts from Christians, written when the Byzantines and Zoroastrian Persians still abutted on one another, rarely say anything about corpse-­exposure: Gregory of Tours’s sixth-­century History of the Franks refers to Zoroastrians only as “fire-­ worshippers” and draws on none of the knowledge likely held by the

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Syrian Eusebius, made bishop of Paris in 591;39 Isidore of Seville’s encyclopedia, The Etymologies, a foundational text for medieval Christendom, repeats the fire-­worshipping charge and otherwise says nothing about Zoroastrian ritual.40 Although the ethnographic material of Jerome’s Against Jovinian would be dutifully copied with the rest of the treatise,41 the work’s medieval legacy was primarily as vector of misogynist contagion. The material on sky burial, far less popular, would be excerpted in one eighth-­century Latin sermon, and then appear, along with so much else, in Vincent of Beauvais’s capacious, widely read thirteenth-­century Speculum Historiale.42 Eventually, Erasmus would cite it too.43

Figure 7. Evilmerodach, Speculum humanae salvationis. Attribution-­ NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-­NC 4.0). Einsiedeln, Stiftsbiblio­thek, Codex 206(49), 51.

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The Latin Middle Ages would have to wait until the late thirteenth century, and especially the fourteenth, for the deliberate, funerary exposure of the dead to once more get much attention, but when it returned, it did so in force. What had been only scattered, mostly disconnected accounts in the early centuries of the common era became hundreds of written and visual accounts, produced and distributed throughout Europe. One root of these stories is an extra-­Biblical legend about Nebuchad­ nezzar’s son Evilmerodach, developed from Jerome’s early fifth-­century commentary on Isaiah. During his father’s time living as a beast, Evil­ merodoch ruled in his place, but when his father returned to his sanity

Figure 8. Evilmerodach, Speculum humanae salvationis. Attribution-­ NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-­NC 4.0). Sarnen, Benediktiner­ kollegium, Cod. membr. 8, 26r.

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and throne, he had his son imprisoned as an usurper. When Nebuchadnezzar finally died, Evilmerodach, worried that his father would once more return, ordered his corpse dragged from his tomb and dismembered.44 Haymo of Auxerre’s ninth-­century commentary on Isaiah would be the first to add birds: when Evilmerodoch cries, “My father dies when he wants, he rises up again when he wants” (Pater meus quando vult moritur, quando vult resurgit), the Jewish courtier Joachin proposes that three hundred birds be gathered from throughout the world, the body chopped into three hundred pieces, and every piece tied to a bird, and then adds, “Whenever these very birds gather together, then your father will resurrect” (Cum hae simul aves quandoque convenerint, tunc resuscitabitur pater tuus).45 A shortened version—­the three hundred various birds reduced only to vultures, Joachin written out of the story, and the disarticulated corpse now simply given [dedit] to the birds—­passes into Peter of Comestor’s late twelfth-­century Historia scholastica, whose vast popularity stemmed from its becoming a standard text in theological training in universities.46 Jacopo da Cessole’s late thirteenth-­century Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium; sive super ludum scaccorum (The Book of the Customs of Men and the Duties of Nobles; or The Book of the Game of Chess), a governance handbook whose Latin original survives in more than 100 manuscripts, features Evilmerodoch as its exemplary bad king, gradually corrected by the treatise’s guidelines; at first, however, he is but “a jolye man without justyce and so cruel that he did do hewe his fader’s body in thre hondred pieces and gaf hit to ete and devoure to thre hondred byrdes that men calle voultres”47 (a vigorous man without justice and so cruel that he hewed his father’s body into three hundred pieces and gave the corpse to be devoured by three hundred vultures). Jacopo’s account is a likely source for the inclusion of a wicked Evilmerodoch in the early fourteenth-­century Speculum humanae salva­ tionis, a set of short, moralized paired narrative portraits of biblical stories, which itself survives in some 380 manuscripts. The Mirror of Human Salvation pairs the story of Evilmerodoch with that of King David’s rebellious son Absalom to offer two versions of filial impiety, one committed against a living father, the other against a dead one. The work is

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richly illustrated: in his various portraits, Evilmerodoch climbs into his father’s tomb;48 in others, he wields a sword, a royal weapon, and hacks away at his father’s corpse, as he would any other human body.49 Sometimes, however, he uses an ax,50 at times with the body on a wooden table, working like a butcher turning a carcass into food.51 The act, repre­ sented with increasing frequency as the middle ages drew to a close,52 presented funerary exposure as a humiliation, even as a kind of after-­ the-­fact regicide; there is no sense here that Evilmerodach’s act could be a custom, let alone a way to honor a corpse. But what the spread of the story also offered was a frequent, even obsessive reminder that human arrogance, incarnated with particular force by kings, would be brought low by the appetites of others, and that the body could be a carcass too, like any other. Into this blood-­thick soil fell Odoric of Pordenone’s account of his time spent in or near Tibet, in the 1320s, during his return from his voyage to China and India. In his work, dictated in 1330 to William di Solagna, a fellow Italian friar, Odoric writes about a funeral method he had heard of, or witnessed himself, which had reached Tibet during the 10th century, transmitted to these Buddhists from Indian Zoroastrians, the Parsis.53 In the ritual, if a man’s father dies, he summons his relations and the clergy and they carry the body into the country with great rejoicings. And they have a great table in readiness, upon which the priests cut off the head, and then this is presented to the son. And the son and all the company raise a chant and make many prayers for the dead. Then the priests cut the whole of the body to pieces, and when they have done so they go up again to the city with the whole company, praying for him as they go. After this the eagles and vultures come down from the mountains and every one takes his morsel and carries it away. Then all the company shout aloud, saying, “Behold! the Man is a saint! For the angels of God come and carry him to Paradise.” And in this way the son deems himself to be honored in no small degree, seeing that his father is borne off in this creditable manner by the angels. And so he takes his father’s head, and straightway cooks it and eats it; and

124    Food for Birds of the skull he makes a goblet, from which he and all the family always drink devoutly to the memory of the deceased father. And they say that by acting in this way they show their great respect for their father. And many other preposterous and abominable customs have they.54

Earlier Latin accounts of Tibetan funerary rituals were already available in the thirteenth-­century missionary ethnographies and travel accounts of the Franciscans John of Plano Carpini and, later, William of Rubruck. Neither writer includes the birds, however; in theirs, the body of the deceased is eaten only by his immediate, human family. And, as William of Rubruck observes, the Tibetans have abandoned the practice, “for it made them detestable in the eyes of all men.”55 Nor was either work terribly popular: fourteen manuscripts, comprising two versions, survive from John of Plano Carpini, and only five of William’s, all produced in England.56 By contrast, Odoric’s travels enjoyed an enormous success: more than 117 manuscripts survive, with translations into French, German, Italian, and Latin.57 The 1351 French translation would itself lose Odoric’s disapproving comment about “preposterous and abominable customs.”58 Here, especially in the French translation, the edibility of the human corpse is not a battlefield horror, nor a sign of the contemptible transience of all mortal things, as it is with most, if not all, medieval accounts of bodies eaten by worms, toads, and other charnel swarmers. The son’s distribution of his father’s body to the birds would have been immediately familiar to late medieval readers familiar with Evilmerodach, but here there is no act of filial impiety. Instead, the ritual includes edibility in public acts of mourning. Managed edibility, deliberately shared out with nonhumans, recognizes how the material stuff of bodies will always come to belong to some other body, and so forth, until our whole sublunary world comes to nothing, but the recognition of the “ineluctable modality” of existence is without disappointment, frustration, or disgust. Things change, but things still are for all that. When the humans go so far as to share out tidbits of the father’s head among friends, they

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join the birds in a distributed, but shared appetite, knowing that our appetites and theirs, our flesh and theirs, are all entangled in systems of mutual need, mutual vulnerability, and mutual, if sometimes unwitting, care: birds are not on one side, and humans on the other. We have here the tools to rethink Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” still not infrequently lauded by ecocritics.59 Through the essay, his first published work after the fall of Nazi Germany, Heidegger managed his emergence into postwar philosophy and political rehabilitation by quarreling with Sartre, with existentialism, and, presumably, with Marxism, portrayed here at least implicitly as unphilosophically tangled up with particular beings. In it appears Heidegger’s solemn, twice-­repeated decla­ ration that “Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of being”;60 first, in a passage on the “thrown” destiny of humans, a quality preceding their ability to choose their particular relation to beings (briefly, humans are da-­sein, distinct from their world, because they know, unlike animals and rocks, that the world will go on without them: the particularly human relation to death loads them with a particular responsibility to being); second, in a similar passage on the “dignity” of the shepherd, “consist[ing] in being called by being itself into the preservation of being’s truth,” Heidegger asserts that “man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of beings” (der Mensch ist nicht der Herr des Seienden. Der Mensch ist der Hirt des Seins). If being the shepherd means just lingering in the clearing of da-­sein, somber and reflective, Man may be disoriented from thoughtless instrumental use of the world, a world so mismanaged, Heidegger complained, by rootless cosmopolitan technocrats.61 But the contemplative loses none of his arrogant certainty that only he, so poised, can take an authentic, truly philosophical stance: Heidegger at least leaves that intact. Furthermore, to be a shepherd is to be singular and heroic among a crowd, the fortunate, often witless recipients of what can be our only temporary regard. Even if it just inspires a charitable and somewhat melancholic attention to the uses to which we put herbivores, metaphorical or otherwise, Heidegger’s maxim has simply not gone far enough, especially if read alongside Michel Serres’s observation that “Man is the

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universal parasite . . . plants and animals are always his hosts; man is always necessarily their guest. Always taking, never giving.” “All the footprints point towards the lion’s den,”62 writes Serres, or, we might say, toward the clearing where awaits the shepherd of being. Odoric’s account of sky burial counters the idea of the “uneaten eater” by requiring recognition of the shared immanence of at least our bodies and their enabling, uneven interdependencies, which include our equally real attachment to our bodies and the communities they materialize. Here we are all what we might call not the “shepherd of being,” but the Futter des Seins, the “fodder” or “pasture of being.” A shepherd is also a body, and that body, like others, is mortal. We may be able to protect others, but our protection has its limits. We can give ourselves up willingly to be food; we can wait until we die; but—­barring embalming and cremation—­we are going to be the fodder of someone else. Heidegger might well have recognized that being da-­sein means knowing that too: but we might do better than him by abandoning his sense of heroic loneliness. We’re in this together. One way to get over our guilt in being a parasite is to cultivate an awareness of the ubiquity of being a parasite. All bodies are food for something else: but the ritual Odoric describes also marks them as having once been homes of the self, in a ceremony that brings the community together to at once bid farewell to and incorporate these corporeal homes of the departed. It is the last point that saves the ritual from being yet another medieval contemptus mundi topos: we are food for birds, or whatever other appetite, but being so does not mean that this is all we are. For the ritual recognizes that we are made of the same material stuff as other bodies, while also recognizing that the passing association in which matter becomes, for a time, self, also counts for something. Our shared ownership of our bodies can be a humiliation only if we decide in advance that exclusive and permanent ownership of our bodies is both desirable and possible and that anything short of that cannot really matter. Give up on that fantasy, and a ritual like this is what might emerge, and with it, a way to cherish the vulnerable things we are for a time.

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Sky Burial, beyond Nature Contemporary treatments of Tibetan sky burial often present it as one option for burials more “natural” than inhumation. As an argument against roughly the last century of American funeral methods—­the insistence on licensing professionals to handle bodies, to embalm them, and to seal them in highly wrought, expensive coffins—­the effectiveness of such “natural” counterframing makes a great deal of sense.63 But here as elsewhere, the distinction between nature and culture requires more critical work. What the “return to nature” means in the context of the edibility of human corpses takes two major, contrasting forms. The first is illustrated neatly by two modern art projects concerned with hungry birds. Greta Alfaro’s In Ictu Oculi, (In the Blink of an Eye), which I first saw at the Bêtes Off animal-­themed art show in 2012 at Paris’s Conciergerie, consists of a single camera trained on a banquet table, laden with food, open to the sky.64 Then vultures arrive, in shocking numbers, to eat and fight over and through the dinner, until nothing remains but disorder. In 2013, at the Brooklyn Museum, I saw similar work by Valerie Hegarty, who installed slashed, pierced, and burned paintings, and murders of sculptural crows, amid the genteelly unvisited period rooms on the museum’s fourth floor.65 Among the furniture and fabric of old New York, the crows and their detritus were mementos mori, upswellings of the repressed cruelties underlying American wealth, chaotic eruptions into the bourgeois order of dining and reception protocol, like the famous Last Supper of Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana, in which paupers leave a manor in shambles as they ransack it in their rowdy feasting. With both Alfaro and Hegarty, the birds are a force of chaos, and nature or the disorder of the Real awaits on the other side of all pretensions to bodily or cultural integrity. For them, order is always a fraud. More common, however, is the presentation of Tibetan sky burial as a return to “natural balance,” not nature as chaos, but nature as a certain precognitive meditative meaningfulness. Since the Theosophists in the nineteenth century, and especially since the spiritualist promotions

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of Evans Wentz in the 1920s, Tibet has endured the dubious benefits of holding the secret to repair the presumptively lost spiritual equilibrium of the overcivilized, technoindustrial West.66 Here Tibetan nature still functions as the “truth,” now not pessimistically, but rather as the for­ gotten ideal of being “closer to nature.”67 An emblematic instance often quoted in environmentalist anthologies is from Peter Matthiessen’s Snow Leopard, whose account of sky burial concludes, “Thus all is returned into the elements, death into life.”68 A (perhaps) surprising number of poems published this century all bear the title “Sky Burial” and also gen­ erally present the practice as a balance or giving back, where “nothing is wasted”: Vida Chu “bodiless soul / set free”; David Citino, “carrion me” returned to “bless the soil”; Wanda S. Praisner, “‘You see?’ I say, / pointing to the birds. / But she doesn’t”; Hoag Holmgren (in prose), “ancient burial ceremony for humans,” “a giving back . . . nothing wasted”; Peter Pereira, “released to the sky,” “not dust into dust / but flesh into flesh”; Cara Dorris, on a perhaps murdered woman, “the vultures have already flown to the / light, yet / something is alive here”; Dean Kootnikoff, whose stubbornly antispiritual poem breaks the convention, “To the side a fire pit / cradles jigsaw pieces of charred / bone in its ashen basket: a skull”; Joseph Harrison, “summoned, for centuries,” “flying / ever higher, / They disarticulate / In wind and sun”; and Eric Weinstein, “A smudge of dust or mud goes / undissolved, though it grows less // with each digestion by another.”69 For these writers, culture tends to be a deviation from a more fundamental stillness or balance; if there is disorder here, it lies not in nature but in human activity. But to talk about being fed to animals as if it is a “return to nature” works only if we think that humans are uniquely cultural; abandon the misconception, and any food we humans eat is just as well being “returned to nature.” The other misconception is that of “nothing being wasted,” and thus of being used up, released, or otherwise erased by fading into the wider, natural world.70 The misconception of being dust and returning to dust (Genesis 3:19) might be better understood not as a humiliation of worldly pretensions but rather as a failure to take responsibility for what we have done in our lives, and even a failure to recognize

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that what we do can have mattered. There can be some comfort in thinking that we can just disappear, regardless of what we have done. Jae Rhim Lee’s Infinity Burial Suit, also known as the Mushroom Death Suit, offers a better model, more attuned to the responsibilities we accrue throughout our lives: the suit is crocheted with a rhizomatic pattern infused with mushroom spores, that when combined with mineral and fungal reagents, help the buried body decompose; but the spores also, importantly capture the environmental toxins that we take in during our lives.71 Lee’s Burial Suit may be thought of as a wearable sarcophagus—­ from the Greek meaning “body eater”—­that also reminds us of the irresponsibility of imagining that the one point of our death could erase what we have donated to or inflicted on others as we have lived. There is no master measure by which we can sum up everything that we are or have done, no master stroke that will cancel out everything else. All measures will always leave something out of balance, something always excessive, always left over. Absolute waste is no more possible than absolute dis­ appearance. Death in whatever form is not the end of culture and the beginning of nature but the continuation of ongoing processes, increasingly unguided by our temporary intentions. To rescue Tibetan sky burial from misconceptions of Natural Balance, predictably enough, I again look to the Middle Ages. For late medieval European representations of sky burial were unhampered by the smugly triste fantasies of the so-­called primitive world occasioned by European world colonialism. Shirin Khanmohamadi and Kim R. Phillips, among other scholars, have lauded the possibilities of the “precolonial” as an opportunity to reimagine our contemporary dynamics of Europe and North America among the regions they have dominated for centuries;72 the “flatter” global systems of the Middle Ages, without a hypertrophically powerful Europe, offers a glimpse of what a juster future world system might be. In a time of “provincial” Europe, Tibet and its cultures would not have been compelled to remain living representations of modernity’s superseded past (that position, within medieval Christendom, would have been inflicted on the Jews, often thought of as “living letters of the law”73). William of Rubruck marked how Tibetan practices, as he understood

Figure 9.  Sky burial in Mandeville. Attribution-­NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-­NC 4.0). St. Gallen, Stiftsarchiv (Abtei Pfäfers), Cod. Fab. XVI 101v—­Jean de Mandeville, Antichrist (Travels of Sir John Mandeville)—­ with illustrations (https://www.e-codices.ch/en/list/one/ssg/0016).

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them, had changed since the time of John of Plano Carpini’s visit eight years earlier.74 And Odoric writes of the practice that takes place in his own present: he may be discomfited, and his French translator not, but neither thinks of what they describe as somehow “primitive” or “precultural,” which is to say, neither one presents what the Tibetans do as unthinkingly, and somewhat pathetically, traditional. Theirs is a culture too.75 In medieval European writing, the cultural character of sky burial is nowhere so evident as in the Book of John Mandeville (henceforth, for convenience’s sake, Mandeville). Absorbing Odoric’s account of Tibet, or “Ryboth,” as it came to be called, along with a host of other works, this compilation of travel lore, first produced in the 1350s, told from the perspective of an invented English knight, would prove to be one of the most popular works of the later middle ages and indeed the several centuries following. The eponymous knight travels from his native England to the Holy Land, into Egypt, and from thence into India and China, and includes facts about the cultures and mores of even Japan, Indonesia, and, of course, an uncertainly located “Ethiopia.” He is generally nonjudgmental about what he encounters, reserving his scorn only for rootless people: the nomadic Bedouins, and, more expectedly, the Jews, living in permanent exile, except for those locked up in mountains by Alexander the Great, who will burst free to swarm the world when the apocalypse arrives. Everyone else, no matter how seemingly monstrous or strange, he is willing to countenance. Surviving in more than three hundred manuscripts, not infrequently illustrated, Mandeville would be translated from its original French into more than ten languages, sometimes multiple times, including an eighteenth-­century adaptation mercilessly trimmed to a mere twenty-­four pages, “Wherein,” as the complete text of its new title page runs, “he gives an Account of Remote Kingdoms, Countries, Rivers, Castles, and Giants of a prodigious Height and Strength. Together with the People called Pigmies, very small and of a low Stature.”76 Through Mandeville, knowledge of sky burial spread with an astonishing thorough­ ness throughout Europe. Mandeville uses Odoric, via the nonjudgmental French translation, and to this, adds one, key line: “And the birds of the country, which have

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long known the custom, come flying above—­such as vultures, eagles, and all other birds that eat flesh—­and the priests throw pieces of the flesh to them, and they carry it not far away and eat it.”77 For the first time in the tradition, we see the mental world of the birds given attention; they’re finally full-­fledged members of the funeral party. The clause on knowing the custom appears in the so-­called Defective Middle English translation of Mandeville’s original French, the most widespread English Mandeville in both manuscript or print; it is also included in the other English prose versions of the Cotton and Egerton manuscripts, and even the delightful versified version.78 Among the many postmedieval English printings, the new line is absent only from one, a 1705 edition based on the Defective Version. And, as both Odoric and Mandeville observe, families compete for whose corpse attracts the most birds. As a representative Middle English translation runs: He that hath most nombre of foules is most worshiped. . . . And thane alle his frendes maken hire avaunt and hire dalyance how the foules comen thider, here v., here vi., here x., and there xx.79 He [i.e., the corpse] who has the greatest number of birds is most praised. . . . And then all his friends boast and take delight in how the birds come there, here five, here six, here ten, there twenty.

That is, even if the funeral ceremony is a gift to the birds, a gift is always bound up with competition and especially with a continued grasping that marks the thing given as a gift, as having belonged to the giver and as being transferred to someone else, freely, without theft, but never so freely as to erase either the giving or the reception. Something of the gift is always retained.80 Bad feelings, misplaced longing, free-­floating delight, and rambunctiousness, coupled with the memory and the pride in a lineage and the hope that the birds will come too to affirm our familial pride: all these are too part of the ceremony as Mandeville tells the story. The ritual is no fantasy of balance, or disappearance, or of a neat division between culture and nature. Nor, again, is there any sense of

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humiliation. Somehow the ceremony recognizes the body as food for them and as ours, at the same time. To underscore how this works, I offer one more cultural object, the artist Alex Branch’s 2011 video Nothing Left to Take Away.81 In it, Branch stands on a parking lot hillock of snow, amid a swarm of seagulls, feeding them bread, until, empty handed, she collapses to let the gulls peck frenetically at the food that remains—­this is her helmet, which Branch has fashioned from bread. Branch has not evened out the distinction between herself and the gulls: she is the artist, the work is hers, and her gift to them is also a cultural practice for herself. She has not returned the world to a presumptive “balance”: the gulls squabble greedily. Bread is the paradigmatic food of settled agriculture and its inequities; and, as she told me, to shoot the film, she had first to accustom the gulls to her presence. The practice of the piece is therefore a practice of mutual domestication, which requires taking a body from one home and training it for another. Her practice is one of negotiation, dependency, shared exposure, and danger. Food is the substance par excellence of nostalgic attachment to the maternal or even grandmaternal, the homeland, the “pure,” “authentic,” and “handcrafted.” Food often functions as a materialized form of fantasies of innocence and belonging and the irresponsibility of being taken care of. Being made into food is often thought to mean losing our human status. But work like Branch’s recognizes that being food is inescapable, not neutral, not natural, certainly, but something we have to learn to live with. Posthuman awareness recognizes eating as a practice of bodily and hence ontological porosity; it knows that eating is never innocent, always a death practice, an always unequal exchange between mortal bodies, always a negotiation between bodies more or less fitted for each other, and that being a companion—­as with Branch and the gulls—­can sometimes require offering up what one believes to be one’s own body to another body, its appetites, its cultures, its ongoing flux, not there as an authentic and inertly true “natural” background to our fraudulent cultural existence, but as another culture in negotiation with ours.

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[ five] Oysters But the life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster. —­D a v i d H u m e , “On Suicide” He that does not perceive any higher degree of perfection in a man than in an oyster . . . hath not the reason or understanding of a man in him. —­R a l p h C u d w o r t h , The True Intellectual System of the Universe What is prematurely, or belatedly, called the ‘I’ is, at the outset, enthralled. —­J u d i t h B u t l e r , Precarious Life

Oyster books love to talk about pearls and Chesapeake Bay’s oyster war; they love how oyster middens chart the passage not of cavemen but of ancient “covemen.”1 These same writers happily accept the oyster’s fleshy invitation to aphrodisiacal excess. And when they look to New York City, they love to mourn the loss of its oyster beds, closed in 1927 by pollution and overharvesting, once home to trillions of the creatures, a seedbed for nostalgia for the grittier appetites of New York’s presumably populist past.2 At times they talk about how the oyster itself grants a chance of ecological salvation: “oystertecture” offers a possible fix to New York City’s hurricane problems. The oyster’s shell, made of calcium carbonate, helps offset the increasing acidification of the oceans; and living oysters themselves prodigiously filter water, as what they ingest and don’t eat 135

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they eject as pseudofeces, mucous-­coated matter that falls to the ocean floor to be processed and rendered safe by anoxic bacteria.3 None of this is unimportant, but even the ecological attention to the oyster as an object still thinks of it as there primarily for the use of others. The oyster itself still remains outside our concern, exiled thoughtlessly to where even Peter Singer once left them, when he notoriously declared that the line between ethically significant and ethically insignificant animals lies “somewhere between a shrimp and an oyster.”4 Since the latter are no more likely to feel pain than plants do, Singer concluded that so long as they’re sustainably produced and gathered (what to call this activity—­harvesting? hunting?—­is itself worth considering), there is “no good reason” not to eat them. If there is, as yet, little behavioral or chemical evidence that oysters can feel pain,5 and if pain, furthermore, is an adaptation suited for animals that can move, an oyster not only cannot feel pain, it also has no reason to, at least once it has passed its first, mobile larval stage, and affixed itself, for its life’s remainder, to some surface.6 To put this as baldly as possible: a mature oyster feels no pain because there is no way for them to escape us. So long as we assume the ethical neutrality of killing and eating things that do not know they’re being killed and eaten, then the only reason to grant any given oyster more ethical consideration than any generally edible plant would be because oysters are animals, and animals, categorically speaking, cannot be deliberately killed and eaten by anyone in good conscience.7 The great irony here is that Singer, at least back then—­as he has since decided that it is better to err on the side letting oysters be8—­harmonizes in some small way with the philosopher whom we can safely call his archnemesis. For in November 1646, René Descartes penned a letter to William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle, that likewise offered the oyster, so helpless and silent, as neatly exemplifying the point where we get to stop caring. Descartes’s chief difference from Singer is to extend the oystery example to all nonhumans. He finished his letter by arguing that if one believed that animals had thought, like us, then they must have an immortal soul, and that one would have to believe this of all animals, oysters or sponges included, which are “too imperfect for this

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to credible.”9 This brief passage is a restatement of an argument he published nine years previously, in his Discourse on Method, that likewise ended by insisting that humans uniquely possess immortal souls, because otherwise “we have nothing to fear or to hope for after this life any more than do flies and ants.”10 Both his arguments make similarly strange leaps. In the letter to Cavendish, the preceding material is chiefly about the clockwork automatism of nonhumans; in the Discourse on Method, about the inability of nonhumans to produce rational speech. To get to their respective ends, each argument first passes through the larger animals, so obviously, at least to the nonphilosopher, thrumming with life, intention, and interests—­nightingales, parrots, monkeys, dogs, and cats. And both finish with animals whose silence could hardly be exceeded. Despite being blamed for inaugurating the modern tyranny of instrumental reason over animals,11 Descartes’s reasoning is essentially that of any Christian medieval scholar, at least insofar as he just assumes that when nonhumans die, they stay dead, while humans will at least spiritually persist. More striking is the presence of the oyster in a proof about clockwork motion: What could be more still? Had he not been so bound to establish a neat line between himself and all other animals, he might have argued that, for example, oysters were incapable of rational speech or noninstinctual motion, and that other animals were not. The very absurdity of the final flourish of the oyster in an argument about monkeys and cats and nightingales attests to a desire to enclose all nonhuman life, no matter its noisiness and motility, within the stolid shells of oystery immobility, and demonstrates another, even odder point: that when a writer wants to argue about the ethnical inconsiderability of animals, or to imagine animal life at its most minimal, or to determine the absolute limits of animal life, the animal that offers itself up more readily than any other is the oyster. This has been true, as I’ll observe below, since Plato, and remained true at least until the eighteenth century. We could respond by saving the dogs and cats from the briny clutches of this border creature, as some animal rights philosophers have sought to rescue the larger mammals from the ethical irrelevance of insects and other swarming invertebrates;12 we could go still further and try to rescue

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the oysters themselves, and thereby liberate nonhuman life in general into the uncertain protection of humans of good conscience. Such generation of sensitivity for the apparently insensible has been the habit of all ecocritics as they seek to ethically outflank one another. On this point at least, I can assure the reader that there is nothing to worry about. My interest is in the rich opportunities oysters offer for rethinking standard approaches to posthumanism. Derrida’s otherwise monumental contribution to critical animal theory, for example, largely has no purchase on the shoals of indifferent, uncharismatic oysters, more like landscapes than collections of individuals: it is not only that they seem to lack the capacity for sentience so important to animal rights philosophy, that they cannot speak or suffer; not only that they can hardly be thought of like, say, cats, as “unsubstitutable singularities”; and not only that they simply cannot look back, so that arrogant philosophers might be “seen seen” in their gaze.13 As for the playful, jealous, social beasts championed by Vinciane Despret’s insistence on the failure of “instinct” as an ethological framework, it would be no easy matter to develop a sociology of the oyster.14 It is that in the archives I describe below, oysters can barely be said to be alive, barely be said to be animals, and could hardly exhibit their “agency” or intention—­those bywords of speculative realism—­ more faintly. Ultimately, I intend to leave the oysters exactly where Descartes and Singer left them, but with this difference: I propose that we crowd in with it, and that, for a while, we give up on our lonely claim to the other side, where Descartes and his unacknowledged medieval masters cleared a space for us to pretend to live a life of free will and obvious moral significance. Singer’s understanding of the oyster as only barely animal, and essentially insensible of harm, accords well both with modern science and, especially, with the premodern archive, which, more than modern oyster writing, is particularly concerned with the helpless, mostly insensible umwelt of the oyster. Unsurprisingly, this isn’t widely known: cultural studies, gustatory tours, and ecohistory tend not to do much with premodern writing about oysters.15 This narrow historical perspective is a mistake. It’s not just that premodern writing often considers the oyster;

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it’s that fascination with the oyster as the border creature—­in Singer, Descartes, and a host of other examples, classical and medieval chiefly—­ and the surprising tendency of one strain of oyster-­thinking to compare humans to them, offers a route to recognizing that the oyster’s passivity and exposure to being injured are not alien to our human condition, but emblematic of it. Thinking with the oyster counters the certainty that the chief feature of humans is our agency. The oyster helps us recognize better our own secondariness—­our not fully conscious belatedness in relation to our own situation, the basic, inescapable vulnerability of existence—­and helps us recognize that not only things that do things merit our consideration. Opening the Premodern Archive The second book of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, a massive and often-­ read fourteenth-­century historical compilation, opens by considering the problem of “þe ordre of þe story” (the order of the story—­I quote from John Trevisa’s 1387 Middle English translation of Higden). To illustrate the principle of good structure—­namely, that lesser things should serve the greater—­Higden crafts a bio-­eco-­rhetorical analogy. For the human body as for the world itself, everything functions well if all is proportional, arranged well, and directed at its proper ends. Otherwise, “anon is grete distourbaunce i-­made” (soon there is great disturbance):16 earthquakes and thunder in the macrocosmos; in the human microcosmos, “ache, sicknesse, and sorwe” (pain, sickness, and sorrow); and, presumably, although this is unexpressed in Higden’s massive historical compendium, disarrangement. What his discussion requires is a base, a fundamental ordering principle to fix a distinction of lesser from greater and to hold each of these poles in place. Naturally enough, Higden finds his sure foundation in oysters: The parts of the great world are so ordered and set that the highest point of the lower kind touches the lowest part of the kind above it, as oysters and shell fish do, that are, as it were, the lowest in animal kind, barely surpassing the perfection of the life of trees and of herbs [that is, they

140   Oysters barely surpass the highest form of plant life], for oysters might not move themselves except in the way that kelp of the sea wags with the water, as otherwise they cling to the earth and cannot see nor hear nor taste nor smell; but they feel only when they are touched. [Also as it is in þe parties of þe grete world þat þey beeþ so i-­ordeyned and i-­sette þat þe ouermese of þe neþer kynde touche þe neþermeste of þe ouer kynde, as oistres and schelle fishe, þat beeþ as it were lowest in bestene kynde, passeþ but litel þe perfeccioun of lyf of treen and of herbes, for þey mowe not meue hem but as culpes of þe see waggeþ wiþ þe water, elles þey cleueþ to þe erthe and mowe noþer see ne hire, ne taste, ne smelle, but onliche fele when þey beeþ i-­touched.17]

Higden’s scaffolds come from two sources: First, Aristotle’s tripartite, accretive division of the soul into the vegetable (which provides for nutrition, growth, and life itself); the animal (sense, motion, and reaction); and the intellective (everything belonging to the “nonfinite”18 list of capacities thought to travel uniquely under the banner of human reason). And second, the scale of being, a taxonomy that elaborates on the tripartite model by sequencing everything from the lowest, soulless forms of existence to the highest, spiritual beings. Though the scale of being would hypothetically allow some fortunate animal species to be closest to intellective existence, in practice, no animal ever held this position consistently: dogs had it sometimes, for their loyalty; or bears, because they mate as we are supposed to do, face-­to-­face. Hidgen provides just the one border creature, that between plants and animals. Having done that, everything else neatly follows. Just before the oyster, Higden enumerates the proper mathematical proportions of a well-­arranged human body, and just after, the gradual senectitude of the world since its creation, repeated on a smaller scale with every human life as it declines toward its own death. Then he lists a vast array of human customs throughout the world. First stability, then the oyster, then a bit of human difference, but not so much that the human becomes unrecognizable as human, as if the oyster’s stolid reliability threw up the fences for a safe field of play.

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To be sure, oysters are not the stars of premodern animal writing: they are not lions, not birds, certainly not pigs or dogs or hawks or horses. But when they do get attention, they get it just as they function in Higden, as border creatures, classifiers without themselves being quite classifiable. For one, they are sexless. Thought not to reproduce “like from like,” but to generate spontaneously from the actions of celestial bodies on the water, the oyster could at least be praised for its chastity.19 Without the miscues of mating practiced or malpracticed by what were called the more perfect animals, oysters were perfectly suited—­according to one fifteenth-­century civic record from Norwich—­to signify the “sadnesse and abstinence of merth [that] shulde followe . . . an holy tyme” (solemnity and sobriety that should be adhered to in a holy time).20 And the proverbial “immobility” of the oyster—­a title bestowed on them by Boethius, Aquinas, and Higden, among others21—­makes them, especially, what remains “after we strip life of all its recognizable features”:22 the later identification is from Michael Marder, here talking not about oysters, but plants, which for him represent “life in its archaic bareness . . . life as survival.” Plants, however, grow in an “ineluctable bi-­ directionality . . . striving at once towards light and towards darkness”; in seeking out good land, or in breaking into stone or soil, plants evince some kind of desire, preference, or “non-­conscious intentionality.” Not oysters: only the rare oyster writer suggests they rise to meet the sun or shrink from touch; otherwise, they are overwhelmingly unintentional animals, without direction, aim, or any evidence of desire. Their passivity, finally, lets Pliny, at one point, declare that oysters have no sensation at all.23 And another, medieval, writer goes so far as to present them as more like stones than animals. This is Philippe de Thaon, in his early twelfth-­century bestiary, which considers oysters toward its conclusion, among diamonds, beryls, and other gems. Pearls generate when oysters open themselves “de lur gré” (at their own will; 3036) to the dew of the heavens, “cum fusënt vivës creatures”24 (as if they were living creatures; 3039). The ambiguity—­a mixture of having a will and not quite being alive—­neatly encapsulates the oyster’s uncertain, even universal, form of existence, which traverses life and nonlife, desire and mere mechanicity.

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In all this, as the sexless, immobile, even lifeless thing, the oyster is not much more than an incarnated figure of pure difference, whose only identity is that of being dubiously alive, and therefore dubiously mortal. The mere vitality of the oyster can be better understood by contrasting it with another extreme figure of life, Lacan’s mythic lamella. In the course of his lectures on the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, Lacan offers up the lamella as a correction to the fable of the origin of love told by Aristophanes in the Symposium. As he argues, sexual difference is not the origin of the drive; it’s nothing so organic and simple as that. Lacan imagines that after the gods split the first, unified people apart, something must have remained, an “immortal” drive, “the libido, qua pure life instinct,” unattached, deathless, and “irrepressible.”25 It is thin and flexible: the “lamella” is the gold foil buried in Greek and Roman graves, engraved with passwords for the afterlife,26 or even, tantalizingly, the “flesh forming the gills of bivalve molluscs, such as clams or oysters (in the class Lamellibranchia).”27 Just a border, a site of contact, a screen on which stimulation plays, the lamella has no particular form of its own, nor any particular aim, and therefore no capacity to be satisfied. Lacan asks his audience to imagine it “envelop[ing]” their faces at night as they quietly sleep.28 Undoubtedly, their very creepiness makes the lamella so good to think with; as a “horrible palpitation of the ‘acephalic’ drive which persists beyond ordinary death,”29 the lamella represents what is so often held to be the repulsive truth of the Real, the irrepressible, Lovecraftian “creeping chaos” beyond the symbolic.30 But the oyster, at another extreme of life, just does nothing. It has its own form, bounded by a shell. It has no desire. To extend Lacan’s myth, it is as if, with the first splitting of the conjoined humans, there were not just the one, but two things left over: the lamella, that pure form of desire, and then also the life that simply wants nothing, and which, for that reason, is beneath even Lacan’s attention. Here lies something inert, undirected, not so much content as beyond caring, but still there and living for all that. If the lamella is a figure of “living death,” the oyster might therefore be called “deathly living” or “lifeless life,” without any of the dissatisfaction of social existence, without the motion that even a disorganized, lamellic drive demands.

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The oyster just sits there, wanting nothing, responding to nothing, aiming at nothing, a creature whose immobile uninterest might be recognized only retroactively, after its death, as having been a form of life. None of this means, however, that the psychic state of the oyster cannot be represented. But what is represented, again, is a kind of border existence, an attempt to imagine a psychic nullity. Such efforts run from Plato all the way to at least the Enlightenment. Plato first describes this kind of life in his Gorgias, here imagining it not with the oyster, but rather with the charadrios, a “stone-curlew,”31 whose infamous habit, per one sixth-­century commentator, was that of eating and excreting almost simultaneously.32 For Plato, the charadrios represented a being that functions as little more than a conduit. Because it lacks the capacity of self-­ mastery that would deliberately distinguish it from the rest of existence, it is helplessly, passively open, with no capacity but the unresistant, undeliberative capacity of receiving pleasure. Not incidentally, Plato’s other two examples in Gorgias include “leaky jars” and, more strikingly, kinai­ dos, catamites, subject to the pleasures of others, but without any of the shame or self-­mastery requisite for any upstanding member of the polis.33 By his Philebus, Plato has reduced his examples of a life lived only “in enjoyment of the greatest pleasures” to sea creatures, “a mollusc” or “jelly­ fish” and also “one of those creatures in shells that live in the sea.”34 The Latin Middle Ages had access to very little of Plato’s corpus, and to the Gorgias and Philebus none at all;35 further work on his oyster passage would have to await the middle of the fifteenth century, with Marsilio Ficino. His Philebus commentary freely translates, equating the life of unknowing pleasure to that of “jelly fish, or a stupid living thing” (insensati et stupidi animalis), “like that of the marine oyster.”36 To advance his condemnation, Ficino concentrates on the jellyfish, which he characterizes as soft, delicate, easy to puncture, unable to move, and with undifferentiated organs, typically found strewn on shorelines. Shaped like a lung (as the Greek pleumon or pneumon can mean both this and “jellyfish”37), their shape is just that of an open sack, “semper . . . aperitur et clauditur” (always being opened and closed). The ongoing, indifferent receptivity of oyster and jellyfish, Ficino says, is an image of “the life of

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pleasure without wisdom . . . the lowest form of life, the one closest to death,” for this pleasure, enjoyed without knowledge, would be “exactly as if it were not there.” Just this side of existence, or nonexistence, Ficino’s marine creatures are at once stolid, insensible, flexible, shapeless, and pointlessly mobile, not quite anything in themselves, yet still there for all that. The eighteenth-­century Enlightenment Encyclopedia provides two last developments of the exploration of the oyster’s nullity, in its entries on both “innate” and “pleasure.” Diderot’s entry on the former concept observes that all that is innate to us are the faculties of sensing and touching; everything else we know is acquired through the senses. Remove sight, he observes, and all the ideas that belong to sight vanish, and so on with each sense: smell, taste, hearing, touch. Without the higher senses, abstract thought becomes impossible. Contrarily, “suppose a shapeless but sensing mass”: such a mass would have all the ideas pertaining to touch, and, to this, each additional sense could be added one by one. The modes of knowledge associated with each sense would necessarily follow, with abstract ideas arising at least with a full complement of senses. Thus, writes Diderot, “through this method and through the other, we can reduce a human to the state of an oyster, and elevate an oyster to the state of a human.”38 Then, the entry on pleasure considers whether the pleasures of the soul surpass those of the senses. The former pleasures, alone, would give the delights of the liberal arts: history, geometry, fine letters, and an unalterable joy; the latter pleasures would, as it were, produce a being “encased in its shell,” with all its happiness resulting from the “blind” and sourd—­“dull” or “deaf ”—­feelings of the moment. The entry bemoans humanity’s weakness. Few would prefer the former, philosophically heroic life; most would be content to experience the mere sensory félicité—­“happiness,” or even “bliss” or “ecstasy”—­“of an oyster.”39 All that is left is pure sensation, the “sensus solus” which is all that most commentators grant the oyster.40 What the sensus solus actually is, and how it has been read and misread in the millennia since Aristotle, has been studied most thoroughly in Daniel Heller-­Roazen’s The Inner Touch. For Aristotle and his commentators, the fundamental “common

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sense” is that quality through which a sense perceives that it is sensing; his later disciples describe it as the hub to which all senses report, which establishes the possibility for communication between them, so that an object might be identified simultaneously as white and sweet.41 For the Stoics, on the other hand, so committed to the supremacy of human reason, the fundamental sense is the one through which all living things exercise care for themselves by feeling some self-­ownership. Whatever it might be—­and Heller-­Roazen teases the question out intricately—­it is not “self-­awareness” or “self-­consciousness.”42 The inner sense, the sen­ sus solus, is more fundamental than this or any thought, because unlike thought, it cannot be removed or fully distinguished from the thing being sensed, even if it operates only by virtue of the slight gap between the sensed thing and the sensation. The analogy between this barest form of mediation and the minimal life of the oyster should be obvious. For, with sense alone, and not much else, the oyster is animal life that cannot be abstracted from its present condition. It is animal, but less mobile than a plant, since even the kelp that move in the water grow. It is alive, but seems more like a stone than an animal. Wanting nothing, it has nothing but a certain, virtually indefinable sensation. Here we have as bare a lump of life as could be imagined, with none of the vitality or striving that so often accompanies metaphors of “liveliness” or “vitality.”43 What could be done with such a life, and what could possibly be owed it? Does the Oyster Need Agency? In Descartes, Plato, Boethius, Ficino—­in the whole of the tradition—­the oyster occupies the zero point of animal existence. A life without motion, sentience, gender differentiation, without social relations, even to itself, a life indifferent to any sovereign incursion or biopolitical intervention, this living being is far barer than any Agamben ever described. We might have called such a way of existence a “threshold of indistinction,” or a “zone” of “indifference” or “indetermination” or “undecidability,” “in which the words ‘life’ and ‘death’ had lost their meaning,”44 were there a juridical exclusion, political danger, or trauma that could be described or

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recognized in oysterdom without insulting the dignity of Agamben’s own somber catalog of examples: Franciscans, Jesus and Pilate, Auschwitz. But the oyster is not in any danger that it could attend to or worry about: it is just indifferent, to us, to itself, to anything, with only enough difference to give it the basic spatially and temporally bounded persistence that we call existence itself, which, of course, means an occupied clearing bounded inescapably by its own nonexistence. Oystery “bare life” produces a version of the concept that we need not worry about, one that requires none of the counterhegemonic, paradoxical textual analysis or Messianic hopes that Agamben’s category demands. Amid the obvious ecological benefits of fostering shoals of oysters, amid oystery insensitivity, what moral impediment could there be to taking one or a dozen oystery lives out of these billions and swallowing them down? The problem is in the preservation of the category of “bare life” itself, even with a being that suits the category so perfectly, because so long as this category is preserved, a space has been left open for innocent killing. The subpolitical, supposedly “natural” ostreum sacrum describes a zone that will inevitably encompass the unprotected homo sacer, any form of human and other life that is held to be relatively insensible to pain, stolid, unthinking, unreflective, nonindividual, swarming, merely quantifiable, and so on. This danger alone is sufficient reason for catalyzing what is by now a typical ecocritical, posthuman response of investing oysters and others with the qualities they would require for their protection. With some groups, people most obviously, such an investment has the character of justice, while with others, like oysters, it can just look silly. But in either case, working to rethink who or what possesses “agency” requires recognizing that the distribution of the recognition of “agency” is a political problem. Limit cases might help us recognize this better than more “natural” agential groups, because limit cases require not simply applying, but rethinking, fundamental assumptions. Twenty-­first century critical theory has witnessed a systematic upending of what Freud identified as the progress of civilization and, given the homologies he drew between so-­called primitive cultures and childhood, the progress of adulthood itself. His essay on the unconscious observes

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that we—­by which he means adult, well-­functioning humans, neither children nor primitives nor neurotics—­once had extended the recognition of consciousness “to other human beings, to animals, plants, inanimate objects, and to the world at large.” Today, in this case, meaning 1915 and its European geotemporal environs, “our critical judgment is already in doubt on the question of consciousness in animals; we refuse to admit in animals, and we regard the assumption of its existence in inanimate matter as mysticism.”45 A century later, we might say that the process is almost exactly reversed. In a representative essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Marder rightly observes that “for scientists . . . the superiority of human intelligence over other primates is a mere hypothesis to be tested and subsequently verified or declined.”46 Even with their short lives, even with their asociality in relation to other members of their species, some octopuses express preferences for certain individuals and show a real knack for improvisational solutions to unfamiliar problems.47 Furthermore, as might be expected from the author of Plant-­Thinking, Marder argues that tests for “problem solving, collaboration, and adap­ tation would need to be indexed to the appropriate environments and needs of each kind of organism, be it an underground labyrinth of mineral resources and moisture in the case of a tree or a complex network of social interactions holding the promise of positive reinforcement in the case of a human child.” The name of his article: “Smart as an Oak?” If apes and octopuses and oaks are not merely prey to ongoing and aimless chains of cause and effect, but also actors in their own right, then oysters might as well be also granted subjecthood, to rescue them too from the thoughtless good conscience of instrumental reason. Such a recognition, development of a new critical sensitivity, or misanthropocist mystification—­depending on one’s own theoretical habits—­ would come to know that oysters and other supposedly “passive and inert”48 things possess vibrancy, animacy, and “hidden volcanic depths.”49 This faith, attentiveness, or delusion might be enough at least to make us hesitate before we put things to use. Some exemplary moments: Vinciane Despret’s What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? repeatedly recognizes that not instinct, but play, disappointment, and

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other “excessive” motives drive nonhuman behavior.50 Steven Shaviro’s The Universe of Things speaks of the “liveliness of objects,” Latourian actants with “their own powers, their own innate tendencies.”51 Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway observes that “it takes a radical rethinking of agency to appreciate how lively even ‘dead matter’ can be.”52 Medieval literary studies has joined in: like Susan Signe Morrison’s Literature of Waste begins its discussion of Beowulf by observing that “the dynamic agency of objects litters the literary canon, a repository of stuff and matter,”53 J. Allan Mitchell’s Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child, speaks of a “miniature medieval horseman [that] possesses agency and autonomy no matter the environment in which it is placed,”54 and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, shoulders aside the sedimented pleonasm of “human agency” with conjunctions like “material agency” or “inhuman agency.”55 All of this meets Jane Bennett’s call in Vibrant Matter for a “touch of anthropomorphism”56 or what Steven Shaviro suggests as “a certain cautious anthropomorphism”57 that would recognize the “creative agency” of earthworms, power grids, metals, garbage, and so on. Shaviro rightly insists that such work is ultimately needed not to extend anthropomorphism, but “to avoid” it. The development of critical sensitivity to agency in unexpected places must be recognized not as a delusion, but as a strategic decision made within an already existing assumption that things that are lively, vibrant, animated, and agential—­ things most like the abstract concept of “the human”—­deserve protections and forms of political and moral recognition that mere objects do not possess. This is not enough, however. The point of “granting” things “agency” (and other associated qualities) is not to give these things this quality and then call it a day, but rather to break apart anthropomorphism from the inside. Designations and discoveries of “non­ human agency” thus first strategically endorse assumptions like those laid out in George Ripley’s fifteenth-­century Compend of Alchemy, which explains that “Thinges ther be no mo / But kinde withe kynde in nomber two, / Male and female, agent and pacient,”58 so that they can “rescue” objects from the disdained side of being a female, patient, object. But

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then they make these binaries strange, and, like any good posthumanist critique, dissolve our sedimented human certainties. When a speaker from the 2015 meeting of the American Historical Association is reported to have observed, “Whenever I hear a student say that objects have agency, I say that I have a bridge that wants to sell itself to them,”59 some might be emboldened to insist again on human difference, while others, through a “touch of anthropomorphism,” might draw the bridge into a circle of agency that nonetheless remains locked into a stubbornly anthropocentric orbit. Some might be led to wonder, however, whether we can in fact cordon human agency off so readily from the patently absurd “agency” of a bridge. Definitions of “agency” that explain it as belonging to beings “that can . . . direct [their] own activities”60 and are “not purely governed by instinct,”61 that are not “purposeless objects,”62 and that are “responsible for what they do”63 obviously do nothing but exclude oysters, so immobile and so blameless; but they should make us wonder whether any act can be arrived at so neatly through self-­governance. Not that this elaboration could have been handled in a tweet, but surely the supposedly agential anyone selling a bridge is constrained to do so with the habits of dead generations weighing on their brains “like an incubus” (wie ein Alp).64 And Freud’s elaboration of the world-­historical trajectory of critical knowledge in his essay on the unconscious ends not with a lonely human clarity, in which we are the only conscious things, but rather, of course, with an uncovering of multiple agencies at work in us, which he admits could be understood at least partly as “a further expansion of . . . primitive animism.”65 Once infected by the skepticism that attends any concerted attempt to explain any concept that otherwise goes without saying, “anthropomorphism” seems to have less to do with granting things “agency” and more to do with entangling a wider class of beings within our own uncertainties and suspicions.66 For if true agency requires self-­direction and straightforward responsibility freed in some respect from instinct, then it requires something like a miracle. It ultimately requires an unmoved mover, or the surprise of something emerging ex nihilo, which is much the same thing. The eleventh-­century Cur Deus homo of Anselm of Canterbury provides one

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such picture of ultimate, pure agency when it asserts that “God does nothing of necessity, since nothing whatever can coerce or restrain him in his actions,” where, since even God’s necessity of avoiding dishonor comes “from himself and not from another,” it is “improper to call it necessity.”67 That’s a high bar to clear. Another, more sublunary picture of agency, which likewise springs free of at least all apparent necessity, has the character what Badiou calls an “event,” because its “aleatory dimension” and “pure contingency” breaks the mechanistic progression of things to open a space for something truly new to emerge.68 The event comes at or out of us through what William Connolly characterized as the “creative dimension of freedom,” in which improvisation surprises the performer, which makes agency possible by dividing it from the causal determinations of mere intention.69 A real “agency,” if it must be free of causal chains, must therefore have an “automatic” character, in the densely meaningful sense of this Greek word as it was translated, with difficulty, by Latin medieval philosophers. Automatic entered Latin in the twelfth century, primarily through Aristotle’s efforts in his Meta­ physics and Physics to distinguish between three kinds of causation: natural, artistic—­the Greek is techne—­and automaton. When it was not simply transliterated, it was rendered either a casu70 (by chance), per se vano71 (by itself, without purpose), per se frustra72 (for no purpose in itself), or per se73 (through itself)—­that is, in excess of the control of some external force. Read as a whole, automatic agency is unrecognizable, unconnected, unmotivated, useless, which is much the same as saying self-­motivated, or up to its own, mysterious use. Since the irreducibly automatic character of authentic agency always slips its bonds to other actions, other things, other desires, who or what could have agency as such? Since no particular being could seem to possess it, in itself, “weaker” or nonsubjective notions of agency can be more readily defended, if much less easily identified, than those that rely on divisions between subject and object, cause and effect, self-­motivated acts and those that are merely instinctual. These are the concepts of agency that emerge out of feminist critique, in which agency is a kind of middle status of responsibility and possibility

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that must always be understood as operating in heterogeneous, not fully predictable fields of force.74 Kathryn Abrams built on years of feminist work, particularly black feminism, to argue that the fantasy of the autonomous liberal humanist subject does anything but liberate women.75 The feminist struggle requires collective action. It requires abandoning the dream of going it alone, a dream that, at any rate, has always sustained itself by forgetting the “background labor” that fosters the self. It knows that the very sense of autonomy is itself a roadblock, since the autonomous self is a fetish to the degree that it believes it wants to be entirely its own. Feminist struggle requires not autonomy, but agency, which, without allowing women “to transcend . . . socially conditioned versions of self,” nonetheless allows them “greater room in which to affirm, reinterpret, resist, or partially replace them.”76 In this formulation, “agency” is not opposed to passivity, but rather elbows out some wiggle room within a field of limited action and dependence to acknowledge how actors without obvious political power, without much obvious choice, without obvious importance, and even without obvious deliberation or subjectivity, can still resist, fight back, or make something new. Here, “agency” recognizes that things happen mostly not through breaks, but through nudges, where self-­consciousness is never untangled from social consciousness and its constraining productivities; here, what counts as an effective subject can only be determined after the fact, to single out what amid a bounded phenomenon swerved the neat line of causality. To all this, we can add Butler’s feminist critique of the presumption that a doer must lie behind a deed, and Irigaray’s characterization of a feminine sexuality as a “ceaseless exchange of herself with the other without any possibility of identifying either,”77 or we can return to the “agential realism” of Barad, in which “agency is not held, it is not a property of persons or things; rather, agency is an enactment, a matter of possibilities for reconfiguring entanglements.”78 If, as Despret argues, “there is no agency that is not interagency,”79 then there is no way to recognize the agency of the oyster without accounting for the field within which agency operates, including the field of recognition itself.

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Rather than gifting oysters with a “touch of anthropomorphism,” we ourselves might instead catch a “touch of oystermorphism” by recognizing how much we have in common with their helplessness. We will get a more thoroughgoing posthumanism, one less invested in pride in our human capacity, if we put helplessness rather than agency at the heart of our analysis. If we start here, we will also do a better job of escaping the persistent liberal humanism underlying the assumptions that good political analysis, and even the identification of ethically relevant beings, requires “giving back” agency to those who lost it, and that recognizing “agency” requires recognizing how these beings resist or otherwise break free of their circumstances.80 The problem with the liberal humanist gesture, of course, is that liberal humanists assume they have the agency they generously distribute to others. We should instead heed Derrida’s questioning “whether what calls itself human has the right rigorously to attribute to man . . . what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever possess the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution.”81 Agency and its associated qualities surely must be numbered among these shaky attributions. We can recall Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theater,” which imagines that as the self-­consciousness of the best artists fades, their art reemerges “most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.”82 Or, just as well, we might remember Leo Tolstoy’s evacuation of agency in his account of Napoleon’s Russian campaign in War and Peace: this is not a war of generals only, and certainly not of generals primarily, but of assemblages of terrain, appetites, masses of soldiers, and the flammability of a great wooden city in winter, where plans are always after the fact, and “everything is the result of numberless collisions of various wills.”83 With all this in mind, we can attend better to our own secondariness, our not fully conscious belatedness in relation to our own situation, and the basic, inescapable vulnerability of existence. Ultimately, then, we may not need a touch of oystermorphism if we understand our own humanity correctly. A “touch of anthropomorphism” for oysters could just as well recognize their helplessness,

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their compulsions, their need to be somewhere, a need no mobility can elude. For whatever our pride in our freedom, all this is human too. Oystermorphism An eighteenth-­century book of brain teasers includes this riddle: Stout-­hearted Men with naked Knives, Beset my House with all their Crew, If I had ne’er so many Lives, I must be slain and eaten too.84

The answer of course is “oyster.” The willingness to imagine the mental life of an oyster, but primarily to give voice to its helplessness, can be extended forward to Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” or back to the Exeter Book, a compilation of writing in Old English that has resided at Exeter Cathedral for nearly a thousand years. Along with “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer,” Christian narratives about Guthlac, and moralized animal poems, the Exeter Book includes more than ninety short riddles in Old English alliterative verse. The first part of Riddle 77 begins like this: Sae mec feede, sundhelm þeahte, Ond mec yþa wrugon eorþan getenge, feþelease; oft ic flode ongean muð ontynde.85 The sea fed me; the water-­helm was over me, and waves covered me, [close to the ground]. I was footless. Often toward the sea I opened my mouth.86

In imagining the oyster amid its own, complete world, the Old English riddle fulfills Stacy Alaimo’s demand, in her study of the common tropes of deep sea photography, not to represent its denizens as isolated in a “clean aesthetic” against a featureless background, as they so often are in

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photobooks, but as enmeshed in a “dynamic liquid materiality” comprising a “soupy mix of particles and tiny creatures” in which no one single perspective predominates.87 With the sea as its helmet, with the waves covering or hiding it, with the earth close against it (getenge), the shell or the boundary of the oyster in the riddle is not its lonely enclosure, but its world, its caregiver, its outside, and interior self. They feed me, and they shelter me, the oyster says, with the object pronoun mec coming twice before the ic in the third line’s second half. But even the belated subject pronoun just marks an opening to the sea, an invitation to be filled again: “Often toward the sea I [ic] opened my mouth.” That is, the oyster speaks only enough of an I for there to be space for the ocean to flow into it, to give purchase to a flow of giving and feeding. For an oyster’s open mouth is its whole body opened. Luce Irigaray’s vaginal environmental writing suggests itself here, as in her Elemental Passions’ “there is nothing to create a wall. Leaves, and trees, and birds, and sky, and grass, all cross and brush each other continuously: a supple and mobile dwelling.”88 So does, inevitably, Francis Ponge’s prose poem on the oyster, in whose interior one finds a whole world, sky, earth, and flowing sea. Then, almost halfway through, with the “muð ontynde,” the opened mouth, it is as if the riddle reaches back to its first line, “sae mec feede,” the sea fed me, closing the loop on the opening to circulate the sea again and again through the oyster’s cavernous body. In the loop we have distinction without antagonism, difference disentangled from a Hegelian struggle for recognition. Then this happens, in a conclusion whose final lines are unfortunately partially illegible: Nu wile monna sum min flæsc fretan; felles ne recceð siþþan he me of sidan seaxes orde hyd arypeð, [ . . . ]ec hr[.] þe siþþan iteð unsodene ea [. . .  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]d. Now will some man devour my flesh. He does not want my skin, when he rips off my hide with the point of a knife, and then quickly eats me uncooked.

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Ontological and temporal distinction from the oyster’s sheltering and shared self comes only in the “nu,” the now, when a man snatches out the oyster to give it the cut of mortality. Note the strange presentation of its shell here: not the expected “scille,” shell—­which admittedly would not fit the alliterative form—­but “fellen,” a leathery word,89 suggesting less rigidity, clear boundaries, or protection than a flexible, inadequate border, or a transformation of the oyster into just any other kind of animal, available for indifferent slaughter. Almost as soon as it arrives, the border is discarded, and what had been a sheltering flow becomes silence. The riddle thus offers itself up almost programmatically to what is by now the ecocritical mode that treats any conceptual isolation as a misapprehension, reification, or still worse. After all, we are invited to solve the riddle, and thereby fix the oyster as oyster, only after it disappears unboiled and unhappy down a human gullet to its final silence and death.90 What had been “fretan,” which like the German fressen, distinguishes animal feeding from human, cultural eating, becomes “iteð,” eats, only in the last line, only at the point when the human can enwrap the oyster in its own preferred understanding of its appetite. The oyster has been allowed to speak only long enough to witness its own mortal helplessness and hint back to its having once had enough form to be enwrapped and protected and fed. And then only enough to be available to being killed. In 1549 another talking oyster appears, in Giovanni Battista Gelli’s La Circe, his adaptation of Plutarch’s fourth-­century Gryllus, or “Grunter.” Plutarch’s work features Ulysses and one of his men, since transformed by the sorceress Circe into a pig, debating the respective advantages of humanity and porcinity. The pig wins. Plutarch’s work survives in just one, fragmentary manuscript, while Gelli’s work, lucky enough to have been produced early in the European print era, was quickly translated from Italian into Latin and the major European languages, and perhaps even twice adapted for the stage.91 It also surpasses Plutarch in its dedi­ cation to the conceit, for in Gelli, not just the one, but ten animals out-­argue Ulysses, until at last he convinces an elephant, and only the elephant, to let itself once more become human. As the elephant had once been a philosopher, its final decision may mean that none but it is sufficiently ratiocinative to recognize the value of reclaiming its human

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privilege; furthermore, Gelli’s conclusion, with the elephant presumably ranking as the most august of his beastly collective—­which includes an oyster, mole, snake, hare, goat, doe, lion, horse, dog, and cow—­may at least hint that the whole work follows a loose Neoplatonic trajectory, in which all-­too-­practical animality gradually ascends toward abstractive humanity. Alternately, if we recall that Gelli himself, despite his growing fame among Florentine philosophers, refused to abandon his own trade as a cobbler,92 the conclusion may be read as a satire: the elephant’s susceptibility to the allures of logos may suggest that only a philosopher, and—­ given the doe’s earlier complaints about the wretched condition of human women—­only a male philosopher at that, would be foolish enough to give up on a happier, animal existence. All the other animals outmaneuver the famously clever Ulysses, because the miserable human world cannot allure them.93 Laurie Shannon rightly insists, then, that the text is not concerned with the animal possession of reason, nor even of the superiority of reason to irrationality, but rather with “whether a good life entails duly cherishing what is necessary or striving to attain what is not.”94 The elephant may furnish the work’s final answer to the question, but it perhaps is not the conclusive one. The first and presumably the lowest-­ranking of Ulysses’s refusnik animals is, of course, an oyster, a former fishmonger that prefers its easy, littoral life to market drudgery and maritime dangers. The oyster argues that nature has made them “better and more noble than”95 humans: she has given oysters their own home, which conveniently doubles as their clothing, and has so made them that food comes to them without any struggle. The oyster takes its practical approach not because of its unfamiliarity with maieutics: having eavesdropped on philosophers back when it sold fish in Athens, the oyster observes that if the end is nobler than the means, then Ulysses must surely admit that the earth is nobler than humans since the earth “at last devours you all.”96 But the offhanded contempt with which it deploys a Socratic paradox suggests both that it recognizes that philosophy is a mere game—­notably, it doesn’t extend the argument to its own material existence—­and that it thinks the only argument really worth making is a simple description of the comforts of

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its own oystery life. Against all this, Ulysses can argue only that humans can do things, but has no answer to the oyster’s insistence that humans have to do things. For the oyster, as Shannon observes, “need and pleasure are not opposing modes of being”:97 felicitous in being what it is, the oyster need not strive for satisfaction, nor for anything else, because it itself is exactly enough and needs nothing but to be. Then the oyster declares the conversation over and with it the annoyance of thinking (“I will shut up my little house and take my repose without a single thought”98) and the frustrated Ulysses seeks out his next opponent, an equally wily mole. However, just praising the oyster for its victory, or Gelli for his skills as a parodist, would miss the exchange’s key element, which is Gelli’s having the oyster argue as an oyster. It is not that the oyster is just happy, nor just that the “originary perfection” of the oyster lacks the lack that drives humans to mostly noble, sometimes pathetic, attempts to make themselves a better world,99 nor just that oysters can be defined entirely by their immanent being, and so need not wander uncertain like humans, lost in their own definitional openness.100 Of course, the contentment of Gelli’s animals in their animal condition is evidence enough of his participation in the long tradition that held all beasts to be innocently happy. But before that argument arrives, Gelli first has the oyster speak from its own particular place, which means showing that whatever its happiness, it is subject to the inescapable vulnerability of anything that exists. For the oyster first agrees to speak only on the condition that Ulysses keep watch during the debate, so that “those confounded crabs shall not throw a stone between my two shells . . . [to] make a meal of me.”101 This tidbit of natural history is virtually proverbial in early modern oyster writing. Here, for example, is a Nicholas Breton’s “Dream of an Oister and a Crab”: Upon the shore neare to the Sea, an Oister gaping wide, Lay looking for a little food to come in with the Tide: But hard by lay a crauling Crab, who watcht his time before, And threw a stone betweene the shels, that they could shut no more. The Oister cride, Ho neighbours, theeues: but ere the neighbours came,

158   Oysters The Crab had murtherd the poore fish, and fed upon the same. When wondering that such craft did live with creatures in the deepe, With troubling of my braines withall, I wakt out of my sleepe.102

The crafty crab, or sometimes a crafty crow, never fails to undo the oyster, as if its shell were just an invitation to imagine any shelter’s ultimate inadequacy. Similarly, though the oyster of the Old English riddle talks, it does so mainly to protest about being plucked from the nurturing sea. In all these, as even with Lewis Carroll’s poem, the speaking oyster is less evidence of an (imitative) rational power than of their inescapable vulnerability. What all these works first or even mainly give voice to, then, is a normally unheard or unvoicable request not to be injured. If this is a recognition of the oyster’s “agency,” it is a recognition of an agency that speaks mainly to say that it is far less agential than it would prefer to be, that it is as much thwarted as enabled by its life.103 This is probably the most sensible way to represent a talking oyster. Of course, no one who pays them any attention can deny that oysters do do things: they are prodigious cleaners of filthy water, and if New York City, for example, had still had its oyster beds, Hurricane Sandy wouldn’t have hit quite as hard. Nor are oysters entirely helpless: they have shells, and their shells give them some definition and protection, even if crabs always manage to find some way in. But the main point of the speaking, plaintive oyster may be the recognition of what has to exist, first of all, if there is to be any agency at all: agency requires an existence distinct in time and space from other things—­no action is possible otherwise, because action needs to act on some other thing and from somewhere—­ and therefore the agent must have a location and some particular when, which means that its agency is always accompanied by its limits, its inabilities, its termination. It all goes further, however, because the oyster’s only intention, if it can even be called that, is that of their sensus solus itself, which establishes only the possibility of a relation toward the self and its limits. That is, the oyster makes it clear that to be at all, even if all that the thing does is be, means being constrained by and vulnerable to

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nonexistence. For a living thing, this means, especially, that death awaits, whether it knows it or not. The oyster’s unwitting helplessness is on the other side even of what Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am called the “non-­pouvoir au cœur du pouvoir” (nonpower at the heart of power).104 Derrida arrived at this phrase after observing that, for Bentham, the question of animal rights did not depend on whether they could use language or reason, but on whether they could suffer. Derrida’s favored animal to think with in his essay was a cat; and cats demonstrably can suffer, so long as we are willing to admit that their cries are not simply the sound of clockwork breaking. However, oysters are not only mute, but also unaware, without any movement or sense of other things, without any ability, short of fiction, to make their distress known. To make vitality synonymous with agency and awareness is to forget nonpower. It is also a mistake that threatens to grant protections only to those things that can do things, or react to things, or even to experience things, while forgetting that things also and even primarily need protection because of what they cannot do, and may especially need protection against threats they themselves cannot recognize or even be aware that they are experiencing. For depending on which modern scientific studies of oysters and pain are embraced, the oyster may even lack the sensus solus prescientific natural history granted them. They may have nothing but their lives. It is difficult to determine whether others are really feeling pain;105 the analogous problem for an oyster is its own, subjective relation to itself, which is perhaps more like numbness than a problem of other minds: Can it ever know if it’s in danger? It is a problem that requires that the question of “What it is like to be,” for example, an octopus, tick, or oyster,106 be answered not only with species-­specific phenomenology but also with accounts of sensory incapacities, whether innate or temporary. In summarizing Jakob von Uexküll’s famous experiments on the environment (umwelt) of ticks, Agamben declares that if the tick’s sensory capacities are oriented exclusively to an awareness of mammalian blood, “the tick is this relationship,” living “only in it and for it.”107 But surely it is a mistake to declare that the

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tick’s existence can be exhausted by what it believes itself to know (or, more accurately, what we can infer about what we believe it to know). Agamben’s declaration is too experiential. The tick’s unwittingness also has to matter: a complete phenomenological account of the tick means attending, impossibly, to all it does not experience. The problem is not exclusive to invertebrates, of course. Cows too may be said to have the same impediment, particularly in slaughterhouses designed by Temple Grandin. By thinking like a cow, Temple Grandin “remove[s] the things that make [cows] stop moving forward: in a good facility cows walk toward slaughter as if toward a milking parlor.”108 They advance fearlessly, not because they have become stoics, but because they don’t know what’s ahead. Surely this is a strange kind of “humane” slaughter: to remove only the fear and not the killing, to increase the ignorance and call that a job well done. Surely there’s more worth protecting than just scared cows, and more than just the cow that has a moment to experience the pain of its own death. As one might expect, these insights can be taken even further. If death is inassimilable to the experience of the thing that dies—­whether we call the experience “consciousness” or sensus solus or some term graced with even less grandeur—­then the ultimate threat itself is always on the other side of our knowledge.109 We can never get away from it, as we already know, but neither can we ever really know it. In sum, if we want to go further than suffering in looking for a paradoxical noncapacity that lies at the “heart of power,” we might seek it here, in the unexperiencable, uncognizable end, what we might call a nonawareness at the heart of existence. We are now well-­positioned to reconsider Descartes’s letter to the Marquess of Cavendish. His short letter only slowly gets to its conclusive denial of thought and soul to nonhuman animals. The assertion is itself a kind of mechanical reflex, an instance where Descartes’s proof of free thought follows a kind of instinctual groove of the belief in human superiority. The rest of the letter, however, is instead largely about the automatism of even most human life: it explains that somnambulant humans sometimes swim across rivers they could never cross while awake; for the most part, we need not think in order to be able to eat or walk; and

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if we tried not to cover our face as we fell, we would fail.110 All Descartes can say confidently is that, unlike animals, we ourselves can communicate things not relating to our passions, but, at least in his letter, he provides no sustained proof that the communication even of other humans is anything but mechanical repetition. That is, only irrational custom or an equally irrational sympathetic guesswork protects Descartes’s human fellows from being eaten, used, and vivisected. His guesswork overlays a more fundamental animal condition that is, for the most part, unconscious. Like other animals, we have our passions; like other animals, our passions have us, and our expressions—­of hunger, of self-­protection, of motion—­are the voice not of our freedom but of our vulnerable bodily existence. To use Descartes’s image, we may not be clocks, not entirely, but we are mostly clocks. Such an insight in turn allows us to rethink the standard medieval hierarchy of being. The tradition is neatly expressed among other places by the fifteenth-­century Middle English Mirror of St Edmund: You may see God’s wisdom if you attend to what kind of being God has given to each creature. Some he has given to be only, without anything more, like stones. To others, to be and to live, like grass and trees. To others, to be, to live, and to feel, like beasts. To others, to be, to live, to feel, and to judge rationally, like men and angels. For stones are, but they have no life, nor any feelings or thought. Trees are; they live, but they do not feel. Men are; they live, they feel, and they think. They are, like stones; they live, like trees; they feel, like beasts; and they think, like angels. [His wysdom may þou see if þou take kepe how he [God] hase gyffen to ylke a creature to be. Some he hase gyffen to be anely, with-­owtten mare, als vn-­to stanes. Till oþer to be & to lyffe, als to grysse and trees. Till oþer to be, to lyffe, to fele, als to bestes. Till oþer to be, to lyffe, to fele, and with resone to deme, als to mane and to angells. For stanes erre, bot þay ne hafe nogte lyffe, ne felys noghte, ne demes noghte. Trees are; þay lyffe, bot thay fele noghte. Men are; þay lyffe, þay fele, and þay deme, and þay erre with stanes, [þay] lyffe with trees, þay fele with bestes, and demys with angels.111]

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Usually, the last, rational kind of being is thought to be the most important. With reason, we can separate ourselves, at least conceptually, from our immediate circumstances and from every other living thing; in mainstream medieval Christianity, the conceptual separation of reason eventually becomes literal separation, as our rational soul, immortal, will be at last rejoined with a perfected body. But among created things, only angels escape being tethered to the previous kinds of being. For everything else, every kind of being is additive, supplementing rather than replacing the previous ones. We could therefore read the onto­ logical hierarchy as one in which the final rational addition is just one more layer over an existence that is mostly animal-­like, plant-­like, or stone-­like. Like angels, humans can reason, but they also have the same and accompanying vulnerabilities and needs—­ as beasts, capacities—­ plants, and rocks. The point is not that humans are really like rocks, but rather that they are also like rocks, and that concentrating exclusively on our supposedly unique capacity for reason means forgetting most of what we are. Consider, finally, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, widely read and frequently translated from the fifth century through the Middle Ages (when King Alfred of England sponsored a translation) to the Early Modern period (when Queen Elizabeth translated it herself) through to the present day. Ultimately the Consolation seeks to prove the existence of free will, independent of circumstance or fortune, whether bad or good. Divine foreknowledge is the impediment: if God is omnipotent, and therefore omniscient, surely all future action is known in advance, and therefore already preordained. Not so, argues Boethius: the objects of knowledge differ from the ways of knowing. From our limited perspective, true for us, there is a difference between past, present, and future. We act in our present moment, while God in the eternity of his own present moment knows all at once what happens in all our moments without interfering in our decisions. That noninterference, combined with our sequential, temporal sense of action, allows us to have free will.112 Boethius illustrates his point by talking about shellfish:

Oysters    163 Many kinds of knowledge belong to different and diverse substances. For sense alone without any other kind of knowledge belongs to living things that do not move, such as sea shells [conchae maris]113 and such other things clinging to rocks; but imagination belongs to beasts that move, which seem already to have in them some disposition to flee or seek out things. But reason belongs only to human kind, as intelligence only to the divine.114

Here, Boethius seems to be making a familiar argument about hierarchies of motion, and then about scales of being, running from the least motile animals, to mobile animals, to humans, and eventually to angels. But the argument is actually about epistemology and, in particular, about how epistemological impediments preserve space for free will to be possible. The very limitation of human reason gives us the sense of temporal sequence necessary to our temporally local concept of free choice. Boethius thus locates our rational will not on the side of power, but on the side of ignorance. Since our ignorance is so very far from God’s infinite, extratemporal knowledge, we are more like oysters than any divine being. It is not, however, that limitation is the root of what we are, nor that our unwittingness is somehow the “heart” of nonpower. The point is not that the “simple fact of being there” is truer than human reason, agency, or even sensation. All metaphors of depth, roots for example, reaffirm precritical hopes of getting at the final truth, whether we located it at the heart, the core, in something “profound,” or on a “deeper level,” all of which offer the fantasy of “revealing” the “ground” that would relieve us of having to think or make decisions amid the heterogeneous swirl of actual existence. The point is rather that critical concentrations on reason, cognition, experience, and agency all go awry by concentrating on their subjects in their potential, not in their presence. That is, these concentrations wait for their subject to do something—­to alter something else, to resist its circumstances in some way—­not only as if the only “agency” worth noting is the agency of misbehavior or resistance,

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but also as if the subject becomes worth considering only when it seems to reach out beyond itself. The point of course is not that the thing is somehow truer before it engages in any of these activities. The point is rather that its being there also requires our attention, and that perhaps the best figure for recognizing what this subject of attention might be like is the premodern oyster. For humans to catch a touch of oystermorphism is not to recognize that we cannot do anything, nor that agency is impossible, but to recognize that whatever our agency, we are still bodily, bounded by space and time. In his thirteenth-­century commentary on Aristotle’s work on animals, Albert the Great grants that every animal has a sensitive soul, but not that every animal has every sense: some lack taste, smell, hearing, and especially sight, but at minimum all have touch, “to protect it from injurious things outside itself and so that it might cleave to things that are suited to it.”115 To put it another way, whatever the alliances of always shifting networks that make agency possible, identifiable agency, like identifiable existence, requires definite location. We tend to attribute to ourselves the capacity of not being bound by our circumstances, on “unconcealing” existence, of immortality, of abstraction, of definitional openness, and so on. We think what we really are is the thing that escapes. But we still have to be somewhere, which gives us a place to feel, or makes us an unwitting target of forces indifferent to our particular existence. Of course none of us chose to be born. None of us chose the vul­ nerability of our existence, none of us chose to have to flourish through dependency. We do not choose the conditions of our being here any more than an oyster does. Our much-­vaunted ability to willingly move, which we hold out over the oysters, still cannot untether us from having to live somewhere. As we know that our freedom to flee danger is limited by our confinement to our presently sweltering earth, we should, on a planetary scale, number ourselves among the oysters, as “such other things as feed clinging to rocks.” So constrained, and so enabled too, we might as well settle for a while on this spot as our starting place.

Acknowledgments

The monograph is a legal fiction. It took years to realize that this was the book I was writing. That realization would have been impossible without the following people and their invitations, which compelled me to come up with something to speak about: Kellie Robertson and Rob Wakeman, for the Animals and Sympathy Symposium at the University of Maryland (the origin of the pets chapter); Anna Klosowska, for the Miami University Dijon Program (language isolation experiment); Kári Driscoll, for the comparative literature seminar at Utrecht University, and, later, at an essential point in the argument, Maryam Esperanza Razaz, at St Chad’s, Durham University (feral foundlings); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, for the George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute’s Animal, Vegetable, Mineral conference (wolf children); Michael Bérubé, for the Robot Weekend at Penn State (worms and ecology); Sharon O’Dair, for the Elemental Ecocriticism Symposium at the University of Alabama (spontaneous generation); Arvind Thomas, for the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA (sky burial); and finally, Steve Mentz’s Oceanic New York event at Saint John’s University (oysters). All my chapters benefited from additional workshopping in a variety of other venues: especially Brooklyn College’s Late Antique Medieval and Early Modern study group (LAMEM), led by Lauren Mancia; Brooklyn College English Department’s Works-­in-­Progress meetings, organized by Marty Elsky; Bob Viscusi and the Wolfe Institute at Brooklyn College for the chance to run seminars on critical animal studies and speculative 165

166   Acknowledgments

realism; the CUNY Graduate Center’s English Department’s Friday Forum; and In the Middle, which Jeffrey Jerome Cohen invited me to join in 2006, and which, during the glorious days of blogs, before social networking monopolies swept in, provided such a generous venue for experimenting with ideas, readings, and voices. The medieval conference at Kalamazoo was a frequent testing ground. Additional gratitude to the following: Megan Cavell at the Centre for the Study of the Middle Ages at Birmingham, and Sunny Harrison and Caitlin Stobie at the Leeds Animal Studies Network, for letting me play out my book’s introduction during my manuscript’s final months; Eric Ensley, Gina Marie Hurley, Shu-­Han Luo, Sarah Weston, and Helen Yang at Yale’s Medieval and LAE (Literature, Arts, and Environment) Colloquia, for workshopping the “Pets” chapter in its late stage, and the same for Erica Fudge and the British Animals Study Network for my work on spontaneous gener­ ation; Cornell, George Washington University MEMSI (again!), UCLA, and the University of British Columbia for helping me realize I had so much more to say about oysters; and to Katherine Ibbett, then at University College London, for an early chance to talk about worms, cats, and Derrida. Thanks as well to Jay Gates for organizing a writing group with me, Susannah Crowder, and Kathleen Smith. Successful grants were scarce for this book. But thank you nonetheless to my CUNY Union for winning Summer Salary grants, and thanks to the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Fellowship for Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities, which gave me time off at the book’s very beginning, so I could think about worms and cadavers in Paris. Friends, colleagues, and a former spouse (and former friends!) were necessary and hugely helpful inspirations at various points in this project. In addition to some of the people listed above, Alison Kinney merits first place here: she taught me how to write, and god knows it wasn’t easy. Eileen Joy was a model trouble-­maker, and I know I wouldn’t have taken the risks I do in my writing without her; Nicole Antebi, Ben Armintor, Colin Dickey, Rob Fellman, Karen Gregory, Ana Harrison, Matthew Harrison, Tricia Matthew, and Vimala Pasupathi were my New York/Edinburgh/Texas life savers; Aaron Gorseth too, for always telling

Acknowledgments    167

me the truth; Jesús Rodriguez Velasco and Aurélie Vialette offered up their home so often, at such crucial points, and earned my eternal gratitude; Maya H. Weimer did me a lot of good as the project came to a close; Susan Crane honored me with her continued encouragement and guidance; and thanks of course to my research assistants at the Graduate Center, Brad Fox (for agency and Plato) and Ja Young (for pets). Along the way, I delighted in the support and work of Angie Bennett, Jane Bennett, Lowell Duckert, Irina Dumitrescu, Sarah Kay, Peggy McCracken, Robert Mills, Allan Mitchell, Julie Orlemanski, Masha Raskolnikov, Dan Remein, Arthur Russell, Myra Seaman, Robert Stanton, and Cary Wolfe, and thrilled for the advocacy and power of Seeta Chaganti, Jonathan Hsy, Dorothy Kim, and Sierra Lomuto: support whatever they do. Thanks too to Richard Morrison, who first encouraged me to take the University of Minnesota Press as a home, and then to Doug Armato, Danielle Kasprzak, Gabe Levin, Mike Stoffel, and Scott Mueller: a lovely experience. Thanks to all who read this. Who knows what comes next?

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Notes

Introduction 1. Marie de France, “Bisclavret.” Good translations of Marie’s Lais are easy to come by. 2. For a survey of the tradition, see Sconduto, Metamorphoses of the Werewolf. 3. Gerald of Wales, History and Topography of Ireland, 70–­72. 4. Hopkins, Melion. 5. Sconduto, Guillaume de Palerne. 6. Gerald of Wales, History and Topography of Ireland, 71–­72. In the first of his several revisions, Gerald cites still more stories of animal transformation, including Welsh, Scottish, and Irish old women (vetulas) who turn into hares and surreptitiously suck on teats to steal milk (sub specie ubera sugendo, lac alienem occultius surripient), before concluding—­as a good Christian intellectual—­that no such transformations really take place. Unsurprisingly, he cites Augustine of Hippo. Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, 106. 7. Day, Arthur and Gorlagon, 216–­17. 8. Hopkins, Melion, 217–­18. Hopkins, Biclarel, 44–­47, makes a similar assertion. The Old Norse Saga of Ali Flekk, in Buchman Jr. and Erlingsson, Six Old Icelandic Sagas, 43–­61, is a distant analogue to stories like these, as Ali’s unmistakable eyes reveal his identity as he rampages as a wolf. For more, see Guðmundsdóttir, “Werewolf in Medieval Icelandic Literature.” For a Hebrew analogue from a commentary by Judah the Pious (d. 1217) on the serpent from Genesis, see Shyovitz, Remembrance of His Wonders, 138–­39. 9. Bryant, Perceforest, 201. For more, see Griffin, “Animal Origins in Perce­ forest,” 169–­84. 10. McCracken, Beast, 62. 11. Crane, Animal Encounters, 64. On wolves and faces, see Albert the Great, Questions, 295. 12. J. J. Cohen, “Werewolf ’s Indifference,” 353. 169

170    Notes to Introduction 13. For an allied reading, see Crane, Animal Encounters, 55. 14. For a comparable interpretation, closely aligned with Agamben, see Campbell, “Political Animals,” 98–­101. On gender and Bisclavret, also see Creamer, “Woman-­Hating,” 259–­74; Leicester, “Voice of the Hind,” 145–­49; Griffin, “Beastly and the Courtly,” 142–­46; and Blud, Unspeakable, 122–­28. 15. Steel, How to Make a Human. Oelze, Animal Rationality, treats scholastic debates about quasi-­rational nonhuman animals, but the important limit is that animals were never granted more than quasi-­rationality. 16. Despret, What Would Animals Say?, 38. 17. Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis, 2.12.16, 193. 18. Albert the Great, Questions, 271–­72. 19. Marx and Engels, “German Ideology,” 50. 20. Augustine, Literal Meaning of Genesis, 96. 21. Tveitane, Strengleikar, 85–­99. The translation, otherwise largely faithful to Marie, differs in Bisclavret’s gestures of submission (he places both paws on the king’s knee) and his violence against his estranged wife (he tears off her clothes rather than her nose). 22. Ohlsson, Tiodielis Saga. For an English summary of the plot, see Kalinke, Review of Tiodielis Saga, 394–­95. 23. Regan, All That Dwell Therein, 5; Eiseley, The Firmament of Time, 28. 24. Fontaine, Mémoires, 2:470. 25. Lawee, “Reception,” 50. 26. The background to these ideas is from Fabian, Time and the Other. More recently, see Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity, x, for a “composting model of historical change [that] recognizes multiple presences in multiple states of decay at all times.” 27. Larson, King’s Mirror, 116. 28. Thomas of Cantimpré, Life of Christina Mirabilis, 18–­19. 29. For the same argument at more length, see my “Medieval,” 3–­15. 30. K. Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty. For a typical use of “medieval brutality,” see Bennhold, “Same Anger, Different Ideologies.” 31. Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 59. 32. Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 278. 33. Marcuse, “Ideology of Death,” 124. For introducing me to this important essay, thanks to Fradenburg, “Sacrificial Desire,” 47–­75. 34. Nelson, Art of Cruelty, 94. 1. Pets 1. Hasenfratz, Ancrene Wisse, 402. My translations are based on his glosses. Millett, Ancrene Wisse, is the standard scholarly edition, based on the same manuscripts as Hasenfratz’s edition.

Notes to Chapter 1    171 2. Herbert, French Text of Ancrene Riwle, 307, “fors soul chat” (but a single cat); d’Evelyn, Latin Text of the Ancrene Riwle, 169, “murelego dumtaxat excepto,” which pairs the proscription with a quotation from Psalms 61:11, “nolite cor apponere” (set not your heart upon them). Millet’s edition includes variations in the English manuscripts, not all of which have book 8, where the cat passage appears. 3. Winnifred Marilyn Felperin’s 1966 Harvard dissertation, quoted in Georgiana, Solitary Self, 65, who holds that the “gentle humor” of the section illustrates a key concern of Ancrene Riwle—­namely, that “if the world is her enemy . . . then the anchoress must understand that the enemy entered the anchorhold when she did.” 4. The bibliography on medieval cats is large, but also catlike in its solitariness, with few mutual citations. Apart from what appears in other notes, representative works include Aerts, “L’homme I” and “L’homme II”; Gray, “Notes”; Jones, “Cats and Cat-­Skinning”; Lipton, “Jews, Heretics”; Poole, “Contextual Cat”; and R. Thomas, “Perceptions versus Reality.” 5. “Non cata, non altilia, non bestiola, non omnis irrationabilis anima sit tibi condomestica, nec tua exinaniant tempora auolantia.” Goscelin of St. Bertin, Book of Encouragement and Consolation, 95; Talbot, “Liber Confortatrius,” 80. 6. Harley, Revelation of Purgatory, 61, 78. 7. Migne, Patrilogiae Cursus Completus (henceforth PL), 75:124D–­126A, II.60. For a digitized early manuscript (c. 900) with the story, see St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 578, 105. 8. The earliest version of the literarisches Wandermotiv of the cat and the hermit is included in a ninth-­century epistolary poem by Ernoldus Nigellus to Pepin I of Aquitaine; see the discussion in Bobis, Une histoire du chat, 59–­61; and Kampling, “Vom streicheln und nutzen der Katze,” 113–­16. 9. Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione, 121–­22. 10. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:177. The Golden Legend also has a similar story about Basil the Great (1:108–­9): “Tu amplius delicaris in palpando caudam gatte tue que delectetur Basilius in apparatu suo valent” (You delight in stroking your cat’s tail more than Basil does in his vestments), here quoting from the Einsiedeln Stiftsbibliothek Codex 629(258), 41v, a1288 manuscript that is the Golden Legend’s second oldest. For the benefit of nonmedievalists: manuscripts are typically numbered by the sheet, rather than by the side of the sheet. 41r would indicate the “recto,” the top side of the forty-­seventh sheet (of paper, parchment, etc), and 41v its “verso,” the back side. The cat story appears neither in the early life of Basil attributed to Amphilochius (PL, 73) nor in the Old English life by Aelfric. 11. De Montaiglon, “La vie de Saint Grégoire,” 509–­44, 1794–­98, based, somewhat sloppily, on Évreux, Bibliothèque municipal ms. fr. 8; and Sandqvist, La vie Saint Gregoire, 1093–­97, based on Paris, Bibliothèque nationale ms. fr. 914.

172    Notes to Chapter 1 12. Tobler and Lommatzsch, Altfranzösisches Wörterbuch, s.v., “aplanïer.” 13. Bibliothèque nationale de France fr. 20330, 47v. See also Jean de Vignay’s translation: “Tu aimes miex cele chate que tu aplanies tous les jours que il ne fait les richesces” (You love this cat that you caress every day better than he loves his riches), Bibliothèque nationale de France fr. 241, 76v. 14. Hamer, Gilte Legende, 1:203. This English translation comes mostly from Jean Vignay rather than directly from the Latin. 15. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 3:66–­67. 16. Salimbene de Adam, Chronica, 146, and From St. Francis to Dante, 90. I have slightly altered Coulton’s archaizing translation. 17. The one exception to all this, perhaps, is the famous ninth-­century Irish cat Pangur Bán, whose hunting for mice its monastic companion compares to his intellectual work. One more cat can be cited: Bobis, Une histoire du chat, 62–­63, recounts Peter Hoorn’s life of the fourteenth-­century saint Geert Grote, whose humility was such that instead of keeping a servant to clean his soup bowls, he kept a cat, which licked them clean. There is nothing here, however, about any affection, mutual or otherwise. 18. Crane, Animal Encounters, 178n10, citing Ritvo, “Emergence of Modern Pet-­Keeping,” 13–­31; and Serpell, “Pet-­Keeping and Animal Domestication.” See also Serpell and Paul, “Pets,” 129–­30. See also the cautions in R. Thomas, “Perceptions versus Reality.” 19. L. Brown, “Lady,” 31: “The cultural practice of pet-­keeping itself is historically specific to the eighteenth century.” 20. Schiesari, Beasts and Beauties. 21. K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 112–­13. 22. G. Toner, Electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language, s.v. “pet(t)a.” 23. See Aberth, Environmental History, 169–­76; and, at length, Walker-­Meikle, Medieval Pets. 24. Binois et al., “A Dog’s Life,” 39–­47. For dog butchery, see, for example, E. Murphy, “Butchered Dogs,” 13–­22. 25. Serpell, In the Company of Animals, 48. 26. Dobozy, Saxon Mirror, 2.62, 111. The work is sometimes illustrated; for the problematic pets, for example, see Landesbibliothek Oldenburg CIM I 410, 60v, which is fully digitized. 27. British Museum, AF.1077. Walker-­Meikle, Medieval Pets, guided me toward several of these squirrel artifacts. 28. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Ms-­5218 réserve, 55r; and Oxford University, Bodleian Douce ms 5, 80r. 29. Oxford University, Bodleian ms Lat. 74r; and British Library, ms. Add. 42130, 33r, 181v. 30. Oxford University, Bodleian ms. Douce 366 131r; and British Museum, 1885, 1113.9441.

Notes to Chapter 1    173 31. O’Sullivan, Register of Eudes of Rouen, 82–­83, 334, 347, 719. Eudes also condemns the luxury of the monastic use of squirrel fur: pp. 647, 663. 32. Burnley and Wiggins, “Seven Sages of Rome”: “‘Sire’ quad she ‘ich wille bi ded, / I nelle neuer ete bred, / For þi greihond þat is so wilde, / Haþ islawe oure faire childe. / & but 3e willen him slen anon, / Ri3t now ich wille mi lif forgon.’” (“Sir,” she said, “I will die: I will never eat bread, because your greyhound, which is so wild, has slain our fair child, and unless you slay him immediately, I will, right now, forsake my life”; 791–­96). In a similar version of the story in K. Campbell, Seven Sages of Rome: “But if þou reue him sone his life, / Miself I sal sla with my knyfe” (Unless you take his life away soon, I shall slay myself with my knife; 875–­76). 33. Whitelock, Seven Sages of Rome. 34. Schmitt, The Holy Greyhound. For criticism of the tale, see Foehr-­Janssens, “Le chien, la femme,” 147–­63; Speer, “Prodigal Knight,” 375–­83; Ritter, Dog by the Cradle, which traces the story from its ancient origins through twentieth-­ century echoes; and, most recently, J. Johnson, “Domestication and Its Discontents,” 57–­80. 35. Gomme, Seven Wise Masters, 28–­31; and Rolland, Seuin Seages, 54; this version, running to ten pages in this edition, swollen with the schoolroom rhetorical technique of amplificatio, may be the longest. 36. Clouston, Popular Tales and Fictions, 2:184–­86, notable for its precise recording of the mongoose’s thoughts as it saves the baby and seeks gratitude. 37. Pausanias, Description of Greece, 10.33. See also the version ascribed to the Welsh saint Cadoc, in which the dog defends the baby from a wolf: E. Williams, “Fables of Cattwg the Wise.” 38. Clouston, Book of Sindibād, 56–­57. 39. Apart from the versions cited in surrounding notes, I have sampled the Canis legend by consulting the following works: Brunner, Seven Sages of Rome, lines 701–­842; Buuren, Buke of the Sevyne Sagis, 405–­92; Cappelli and Latini, Il libro dei sette savi, 8–­10; Jean Gobi, La Scala Coeli, 379; Misrahi, Le roman des sept sages, lines 1163–­398; Johannes de Alta Silva, Dolopathos, 40–­43; Speer and Foehr-­Janssens, Le roman des sept sages de Rome, 178–­91 (which adds another animal, a bear, which the knight is pressured into lending out for a spectacle of combat: in his absence, the “serpent malfaisant, satainique,” 183, appears); Runte, Li ystoire de la male marastre, 14–­17; Section de traitement automatique, Les sept sages de Rome, 10–­14; Herrtage, Gesta Romanorum, 98–­99; and R. Williams, “Seven Wise Men of Rome,” 649. For a delightful summary of the tradition, see E. Ross, Book of Noble Dogs, 101–­5. The list of analogues in K. Campbell, Seven Sages of Rome, lxxviii–­lxxxxii, as well as in Runte, Li Ystoire de la male marastre, appendix 3, provides a good sense of the story’s enormous popularity, from China to Iberia.

174    Notes to Chapter 1 40. Kingscote and Sastri, Tales of the Sun, 162–­64. 41. For several exceptions outside the Seven Sages tradition, see Rappoport, Folklore of the Jews, 173–­75, in which the wife is absent because she is ritually purifying herself after childbirth: when she finds that her husband has killed the dog, she intones a moral about the dangers of acting hastily; the version in Epstein, Tales of Sendebar, 164–­67, avoids misogyny simply by eliminating the wife from the narrative altogether; the Welsh “Cattwg the Wise,” cited above, has the wife at church, and the man tempted to hunt by the sound of hounds: the dog’s struggle, and the man’s betrayal, all occur before the wife returns; despite the title, in Keller, Book of the Wiles of Women, 33, the wife has specifically instructed her husband not to leave the house: the moral of the story (“the deceits of women are boundless”) is startlingly inapposite in this context. 42. K. Campbell, Seven Sages of Rome, lines 920–­22. 43. Aquinas, Summa Theologica (henceforth ST), 2a2ae, q. 25, a. 3. For Christian friendship, see McEvoy, “Theory of Friendship,” 3–­44. 44. For more, see J. Barad, “Tension,” 127–­43. 45. Meyer, Death-­Tales, 31. 46. In H. Hudson, Four Middle English Romances, 539. 47. Bollandus, Acta Sanctorum, 4.86, 675. For more, see Flint, “Saint,” 343n3; and Aitchison, “Holy Cow!,” 875–­92. 48. Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 59. 49. Ahmed, 109. 50. Butler, Precarious Life, 21. 51. Brault and Naas, “To Reckon with the Dead,” 5. 52. Rickels, “Pet Grief,” 72. Thanks to Aranye Fradenburg for recommending this article to me. At more length, see Kunziar, Melancholia’s Dog. 53. Augustine, De civitate dei, 1:35. For the evidence of the continued influence of Augustine’s gloss, see Aquinas, ST, 2a2ae, q. 64, a. 1, “Whether it is unlawful to kill any living thing”; and Grosseteste, De decem mandatis, 58–­64. 54. Whitelock, Seven Sages of Rome, line 736. 55. Lim, “‘A Stede Gode and Lel,’” 50–­68. 56. See Johnson, “Domestication and Its Discontents,” 66, whose engagement with the Canis legend is very much in harmony with my own. 57. See Derrida, Gift of Death, 71, in a passage on the arbitrary and unjustifiable love of particular cats. 58. Derrida, 70. 59. Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 79. 60. All citations from Chaucer are from Riverside Chaucer; modern English translations are my own. The Roman numeral before the line numbers identify the particular “fragment” of The Canterbury Tales, an incomplete work whose tales in its many fifteenth-­century manuscripts tend to cluster in groups

Notes to Chapter 1    175 (“fragments”) that themselves appear in various orders in the various manuscripts of the tales. Fragment I invariably starts with the General Prologue. For a recent treatment of medieval lapdogs and women, see Sand, “And Your Little Dog Too,” 165–­86. 61. Wright and Halliwell-­Phillipps, Reliquiæ Antiquæ, 1:155, from the British Library, Harley 209 7r. 62. Steadman, “Prioress’ Dogs and Benedictine Discipline,” 1; and Kelly, “Chaucer’s Nuns,” 115–­32. Simons, “Prioress’s Disobedience of Benedictine Rule,” 81, references an address given to Benedictine nuns of Chatteras in Cambridge in 1345. 63. Rothwell, “Stratford Atte Bowe Re-­visited,” 184–­207; and Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, 322–­23 (for example). 64. For a good recent treatment of the genre, see Hostetter, “Sir Gowther,” 497–­516. 65. For a rich discussion of the word’s meaning, see Eaton, “Sin and Sensi­ bility,” 495–­513. For one illustration of the word elsewhere in The Canterbury Tales, see the prose “Tale of Melibee”: “And therefore seith Seint Austyn that ‘there been two thynges that arn necessarie and nedefulle, and that is good conscience and good loos; that is to seyn, good conscience to thyne owene persone inward and good loos for that neighebor outward’” (VII.1642–­43) (and therefore Saint Augustine writes, “There are two necessary things, and these are good moral judgment and good reputation: good moral judgment for your own inner person, and good reputation outwardly, for your neighbor.”) 66. For a review of viewpoints, which largely remain current, see Andrew, Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 146–­54. The best study of critical response to the Prioress is Blurton and Johnson, Critics and the Prioress. 67. Raymo, “General Prologue,” 2:15. See 18n34 for a summary of criticism on the dogs. 68. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, 178. 69. Condren, “Prioress,” 194, 214n16. 70. Price, “Sadism and Sentimentality,” 199. See also Spector, “Empathy and Enmity,” 221–­29. 71. Simons, “Prioress’s Disobedience of Benedictine Rule,” 80. 72. Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer, 38. 73. Eaton, “Sin and Sensibility,” 510, 509, and throughout. 74. Finlayson, “Chaucer’s Prioress,” 171–­74. Wood, “Chaucer’s Use of Signs,” 100, faults the criticism with being “strangely affectionate,” for “as a nun who wants to be a fashionable lady,” the Prioress “ends up being neither. She is nothing.” 75. Oliver, “Pet Lovers, Pathologized.” 76. For a thoroughly argued defense of the Prioress’s costume, see Hodges, Chaucer and Clothing, 29–­81. Cf. Correale and Hamel, Sources and Analogues, 2:18n37; and Farrell, “Hybrid Discourse,” 84.

176    Notes to Chapter 1 77. Moisà, “Giving of Leftovers,” 81–­94. 78. Geoffroy de La Tour Landry, Book of the Knight, 28–­29. 79. A. Hudson, “Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards,” 28. 80. Langland, Vision of Piers Plowman, V.151–­66; Dean, Six Ecclesiastical Satires. The bad nunnery of the latter poem includes Dames Love Unordynate, Lust, Wantowne, Nyce, Envy, and Dysobedyent. 81. For this list of the common “failings of nuns” in medieval satire, see Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 129. I am thus less inclined than Carol M. Meale to identify the Prioress as a familiar stereotype “sit[ting] easily amidst this view [in Piers Plowman, etc.] of the lack of commitment amongst many women to the religious life”: “Women’s Piety and Women’s Power,” 51, 43. 82. Furnivall, Babees Book, 23–­24, and Caxton’s Book of Curtesye, 64–­65. 83. I am indebted here to Rosenberg, “How Meat Changed Sex,” 498–­99: for example, “The innocence of the meat animal’s voice is precisely what justifies its availability for a violence that carries no meaning, including, but hardly limited to, the violence allowed by agricultural exemptions.” 84. My reading of the Prioress as someone who refuses to give up her desire, coupled with an attention to the communities her desire creates, is indebted to Ruti, Ethics of Opting Out. 85. Lochrie, Heterosyncracies, 60, in exploring a reading of the Prioress as a “product of the Lollard imagination,” is allied with my approach in suspending any notion of the Prioress as straight. For one historical study of erotic pet love, see Hartle, “Sleeping with the Menagerie,” 189–­204. 86. Simons, “Prioress’s Disobedience of Benedictine Rule,” 80. Similarly, Farrell, “Hybrid Discourse,” 85–­86, takes the introduction of weeping for mice as part of a “hatchet job” in the portrait, designed at every turn to make us find the Prioress ridiculous. 87. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 28. 88. The charge of mimicry belongs to Patterson, “‘Living Witnesses of Our Redemption,’” 507–­60. 89. For an ironic version of the trope, see the opening lines to the B side of Crass’s “Reality Asylum / Shaved Women,” 1979: “Shaved women collaborators / Shaved women are they traitors?” 90. Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book, 82, whom I cite here not scoldingly, but because Bale presents the common assessment with such elegance. See also his words in “‘A Maner Latyn Corrupt,’” 58. 91. Žižek, “Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead,” remains a useful analysis of how communities organize themselves around the protection and enjoyment of an indefinable “thing.” For fascinating contemporary examples of animal love and its misogynist opponents, see Chang, “Trans-­Species Care,” 287–­94; and Chang and Ralph, “Women and Interspecies Care,” 151–­65.

Notes to Chapter 2    177 92. Pettman, Human Error, 95. 93. Rudy, Loving Animals, 35. 94. Rudy, 41. 95. Rudy, 184. 96. For a differing opinion on the Parson’s nasty statement about Jews, see Rex, “Sins of Madame Eglentyne,” 14–­18. 97. For more on the failure of the “dramatic interpretation” of the Prioress’s tale, see Blurton and Johnson, Critics and the Prioress, 112–­14. 98. Godfrey, “Fifteenth-­Century Prioress’s Tale,” 93–­115; Bale, Jew in the Medi­ eval Book, especially 91–­103; Boyarin, Miracles of the Virgin, 159–­64; Blurton and Johnson, “Reading the Prioress’s Tale,” 134–­58. 99. Ruti, Ethics of Opting Out. 100. Crane, “Animality,” 129. 101. “Frames” comes from Butler, Frames of War. For more on community and its problems, see Esposito, Bíos. 102. For a summary of critical work on the phrase, see Farrell, “Hybrid Discourse,” 53–­54; and especially Hodges, Chaucer and Clothing, 103–­8. 2. Isolated and Feral Children 1. The Jewish writers Philo of Alexandria, Josephus, and Pseudo-­Philo (Liber antiquitatem biblicarum, whose Hebrew original dates to the first or second century, its Latin translation to the third or fourth) provide the earliest extant associations of Nimrod with Babel Tower. See Sherman, Babel’s Tower Translated, 170–­7 1, 178–­81; and van der Toorn and van der Horst, “Nimrod,” 17–­19. Augustine, City of God, 16.4; and Bede, On Genesis, 230–­31, are influential early Christian commentarial nodes. 2. See also Genesis 3:22, the expulsion from Eden, and possibly 6:3, God’s response to the early longevity of humans and their admixture with the Nephilim, the “sons of God.” 3. For an early parallel, dating to roughly 2000 BCE, see Kramer, “‘Babel of Tongues,’” 108–­11. 4. Augustine, On Genesis, for The Literal Meaning of Genesis, 9.9, 387, and Two Books on Genesis against the Manichees, 1.9.5, 63 (“With God there is just sheer understanding, without any utterance and diversity of tongues”). 5. For a set of citations, see Resnick, “Lingua Dei, Lingua Hominis,” 55–­57. 6. VanderKam, Book of Jubilees, 3:28, 20–­21; 12:25–­26, 73. Originally written in Hebrew, the text survives largely in Ethiopic translations of the fourteenth through the twentieth centuries. For later (but highly skeptical) references to the language shared by humans and nonhumans, both written in Greek, see the first-­ century text by the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, On the Con­fusion of Tongues, 3.12–­15; and also Synkellos, Chronology, 8, from the ninth century.

178    Notes to Chapter 2 7. Budge, Cave of Treasures, 132. 8. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 9.1, 191; Bede, On Genesis, 121; Augustine, City of God, 16.11, 535. 9. Interrogationes et responsiones in Genesin, PL 100: 533D; for later repetitions, see the Genesis commentaries by Remigius of Auxerre, PL 131: 81B; and Angelomus of Luxeuil, PL 155: 167B. 10. Hildegard of Bingen, Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, letter 23, 76–­80. Thanks to Nathan Campbell for recommending I track down Hildegard. As tempting as it might be to identify the 1,011 nouns and 23 letters Hildegard invented for her lingua ignota with the paradisiacal language, Higley, Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language, 29, observes that it “stretches credibility that names for . . . ‘excrement’ and ‘privy cleaner’ would be needed by the virgin throng in heaven.” 11. Resnick, “Lingua Dei, Lingua Hominis,” 57, a foundational and thorough account of the development of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin as the three “holy languages” of Latin Christendom. 12. Carey, Apocrypha Hiberniae II, 113. For the date of the first recension, see p. 92. 13. To be sure, Christians did not always accord Hebrew an honored status: the Book of John Mandeville repeats the belief that Gog and Magog, the horrific Jewish tribe enclosed in Scythia by Alexander the Great, speak Hebrew, a language preserved by the remaining, unenclosed Jews, scattered homeless throughout the world, so they can lead these terrible people to ruin Christendom when their anthropophagous brethren break out during the world’s last days. J. Mandeville, Book of Marvels and Travels, 105. 14. Herodotus, Famous History of Herodotus, folio 70, EEBO, STC / 216:06. The attribution to Barnabe Rich is both traditional and also widely supposed to be incorrect. 15. M. Thomas, “Evergreen Story of Psammetichus’ Inquiry,” 37–­62. For recent, reliable surveys of the primary texts, see Gera, Ancient Greek Ideas, 69–­ 111; and Stevens, “Not beyond Herodotus,” 278–­97. 16. I have been unable to consult its earliest editions (two in 1540, and another ten years later); for the 1570 edition, easily available online, see Mexía, Silva de varia lección, chapter 25, folio 26r. For the French and English, see Mexía, Les diverses leçons, 139–­40, and Foreste or Collection of Histories, 22–­23. The title page of the French 1576 edition likely omitted the Roman numeral L, resulting in an impossible claim for 1526 for its printing date, an error perpetuated by the metadata of the Gallica website of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. 17. Joubert, Erreurs populaires, 596, and Second Part, 243. Joubert explains that he had written most of his discussion of the experiment—­which begins with depositing two children with a mute nurse “ in a forest, where they could

Notes to Chapter 2    179 not hear any human voice” (en une forest, ou ils ne pouvoint ouïr aucune vois humaine; 575)—­before having read Mexía. 18. Racine, “Herodotus’s Reputation,” 195–­96. 19. Quintilian, Orator’s Education, 10.1, 257. For a hypothesis that Quintilian may be telling a version of the story independent of Herodotus, see Taylor, “Another Royal Investigation,” 500–­502. 20. “Bekeselêne,” Suda Online, from a tenth-­century Byzantine commentary. For further discussion, see Stevens, “Beyond Herodotus,” 287. 21. He enjoyed a brief revival in the twelfth century; see J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, 123–­24. 22. Cosaert, Text of the Gospels, 13; Clement of Alexandria, Quis dives salve­ tur, x. 23. Tertullian, “Ad Nationes,” chapter 8. 24. Pearse, “Tertullian.”  25. Salimbene, Chronica, 350. For a brief contextualization of the passage amid “signs, especially from the twelfth century onwards, of tenderness towards infants and small children,” see McLaughlin, “Survivors and Surrogates,” 39. 26. Alas for my ignorance, these works are currently available only in Hebrew; for commentary, see especially Idel, Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics, 15, 146–­ 47nn73–­75. A certain Obadiah the Prophet of Guratam tells a version in which a king performs the experiment twice, with a mixture of boys and girls, the first time with circumcised boys, the second, with uncircumcised: in both cases, the girls spontaneously produce Hebrew, but only in the first do the boys: see Gera, Greek Ideas on Speech, 94. Obadiah’s reference to a Jewish printing press elsewhere in his work indicates a postmedieval composition date; see Heschel, Prophetic Inspiration after the Prophets, 25. See also Eco, Search for the Perfect Language, 49–­50. 27. Lindsay of Pitscottie, Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, 237. The work first appears in print in 1728; for an early assessment of the story, see Scott, Tales of a Grandfather, 219: “It is more likely they would scream like their dumb nurse, or bleat like the goats and sheep on the island.” 28. Abul Fazl, Akbar’s own court historian, began the work, but was murdered (in 1602) before he could complete it. Abū al-­Faz̤l ibn Mubārak, Akbar n̄ama, 581. I have been unable to consult the recent, authoritative translation of The History of Akbar published by Harvard University Press. 29. Shah [Muhsin Fani, attributed], Dabistán, 90–­91. No more recent English translation yet exists; according to the assessment of Ernst, “Situating Sufism and Yoga,” 41n111, the Shea and Troyer translation is at times “hopelessly incorrect.” 30. For the two slightly divergent English translations, see Abd-­Ul-­Qadir bin Maluk Shah [Al-­Badaoni], Muntaḵẖabu-­T-­Tawārīḵẖ, 296; and Elliot, History of India, 533.

180    Notes to Chapter 2 31. Peruschi, Informatione del Regno; and Historica relatio. 32. Anon., True Relation, 5–­7. The earliest version of the ape story might be that of Roe, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, 318. See also Purchas, Purchas His Pil­ grimes, 1:587. 33. Maclagau, “Jesuit Missions,” 77. No single-­volume translation, or even edition, of Xavier’s correspondence seems yet to exist. The religious version of the story also appears in Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, 5:516, which concludes: “For as they spake no certaine Languge, so is not hee setled in any certaine Religion.” 34. For examples of mixing the story with Herodotus, see Besold, De natura populorum, 57, which, like Xavier, has Akbar conduct a religious experiment. Pfeiffer, Introductio in orientem, 8, cites Besold, but adds that the Hebrew masters at Akbar’s court insisted that Hebrew was “implanted naturally” (naturaliter impantatam) in the first human. In neither of these, Xavier included, are the nurses and guards deaf; they are only commanded not to speak. 35. See, for example, a 1632 entry in the journal of the English traveler Peter Mundy, excerpted in Fisher, Visions of Mughal India, 78, where the nurses are mute. Borch, De causis diversitatis linguarum; and Ludwig, Brevis commentatio de proprietate nominum, 13 (which quotes the Borch exactly), are effectively secular, both because of their context of linguistic speculations and because their brevity trims away Akbar’s motivations. 36. Sennert, Paralipomena, 76. For a similar point, see Cardoso, Philosophia libera, 648, which cites Jesuit letters as its source, and adds that not even birds can sing without being taught. 37. Borch, De causis diversitatis linguarum, 1, whose first page mixes the story with Herodotus and Akbar. 38. The most frustrating of these may be Gera, Greek Ideas on Speech, because it is an exceedingly learned account; but she talks about the story as if it literally happened, for example, at p. 78, “Perhaps only ordinary people could be compelled by the king to hand over their children for experimental purposes.” At p. 71, she argues that bekos sounds Egyptian, and the experiment seems more Greek, “more specifically, Ionian,” than Egyptian; by contrast, Borst, Der Turm­ bau von Babel, 1:40, determines that “the formulation of the question is Egyptian and not Greek” (die Fragestellung ist ägyptisch und nicht griechisch). There are other befuddling responses; so M. Davis, Soul of the Greeks, 80, scoffs at the Herodotus story as “utterly preposterous” and faults Psamtik’s reasoning; Danesi, Vico, Metaphor, 6, judges the experiment “clearly preposterous and bizarre”; Hamel, Reading Herodotus, disapproves of “Psammetichus’ peculiar brand of child abuse”; Benardete, Herodotean Inquiries, 33, faults the experiment for its design, including its failure to distinguish between logos and glossa. Less distressing, if only because its authors do not practice cultural history, Bonvillian,

Notes to Chapter 2    181 Garber, and Dell, “Language Origin Accounts,” 219–­39, pairs its doubt of the Psamtik story with certainty about Akbar’s. Stevens, “Not beyond Herodotus,” deserves praise, however, both for correctly understanding the Herodotus account as mythic and also for detecting a sublimated desire in some linguistics scholarship to be able to perform the experiment. 39. For example, see Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 36.19, 67. 40. Salimbene de Adam, Chronica, 350–­53. 41. Ibn Tufail, Hayy Ibn Yaqzan; and Ibn al-­Nafīs, Theologus autodidactus. The former, translated into Latin at Oxford in 1671 as Philosophus autodidactus, exerted no small influence on European Enlightenment speculations about the origins of language, although neither Ibn Tufail nor Ibn al-­Nafīs are themselves much interested in the topic. Their autodidacts each acquire language through teachers, and that only long after they have reasoned their way on their own far into major philosophical truths. 42. B. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, 261–­62. 43. Condillac, Origin of Human Knowledge, 171–­79. 44. Montesquieu, My Thoughts, #158, 51. Henry C. Clark bases his translation on Louis Desgrave’s definitive French edition of Montesquieu’s mass of notebooks, which date from 1720 until his death. 45. Manucci, Storia do Mogor, 142. 46. Catrou, Histoire generale, 137. 47. The anonymous translation compiled as Manucci and Catrou, History of the Mogul Dynasty, 117. 48. For discussions of Romantic, then Darwinist, treatments of signing as the original, primitive, natural, or animal language, concentrating largely on the nineteenth century, see Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 36–­55; and Esmail, Read­ ing Victorian Deafness, 102–­32, who offers several such observations from mid-­ nineteenth-­century language theorists: “Language . . . becomes grander, more dignified and more complex as it becomes less dependent on the body” (125). Amman, Surdus loquens, 2, a handbook for teaching the deaf to speak, originally published in 1692, and translated incompletely into English a year later, provides an anticipation of such sentiments in Catrou’s era, with its paean to the voice as the very breath of God: “And how little the deaf differ from beasts” (quamque parum a brutis animantibus different). For further discussion, see Bauman, “Listening to Phonocentrism”; Lane, When the Mind Hears, 100–­101, which led me to the Amman; and especially Sanchez, Deafening Modernism, whose interest in “nonverbal communication” as resisting the “particular distaste for bodies in some branches of modernist writing” (68), as well as her engagement with queer theory and care ethics (e.g., 48–­61), is allied to my project here. 49. For an easily accessible study, rich in basic textual scholarship, see Lewis, “Legend of Sargon.”

182    Notes to Chapter 2 50. Herodotus, Persian Wars, 1.120–­22, 156–­61. 51. Notably, Peter Comestor’s twelfth-­century Historia scholastica, a historiographical commentary on the Bible, draws from a source that restores the dog to the story; PL 198: 1471a. 52. The mirror is now at the Antiquarium Comunale in Rome. Debate continues about what it depicts, although it certainly shows two infants and a nurturing animal, perhaps a wolf. As Wiseman, Remus, argues that Romans added Remus to the story to record guilt over human sacrifice during wars with the Gauls in 296 BC, he must insist that the mirror is too old to depict these particular twins. For discussion, see Tennant, “Reflections on a Mirror,” 64–­79; and Massa-­Pairault, “Romulus et Remus,” 505–­25. The Capitoline she-­wolf, the magnificent Etruscan sculpture of the fifth or even sixth century BCE, may represent the twins’ foster mother; however, the twins that accompany the statue now are of medieval vintage. Tennant, “Lupercalia,” 81–­93, offers up a handful of other early representations: “Campanian coinage from the period c. 335–­321 BC” and, on pp. 81–­82, a Bolognese stele of the first half of the fourth century BCE. 53. Racine, “Herodotus in Latin Literature,” 196, provides a neat summary of the early transmission of the story. 54. Cicero, On the Republic, 2.1, 112. 55. Livy, History of Rome, 1.1, 18–­19, “Sunt qui Larentiam vulgato corpore lupam inter pastores vocatam putent.” Other Euhemerizing accounts claim that “Lupa” may be a proper name. Freeman, “Romulus and Remus Story,” 6, includes a useful chart of the elements of its story and their appearances across all early written witnesses. 56. A foundational work is Dumézil, Gods of the Ancient Northmen, parts of which were printed as early as 1939, and which would be heavily revised for its second (French) edition of 1959. For a representative treatment of “martial brotherhoods” from “time immemorial,” see White, Myths of the Dog-­Man, 27. For a brief history of the field’s German development, from Leopold von Schroeder to Höfler, see Campi, “Associations masculines,” 147–­51. Before it moves into a long argument that “rye . . . is a kind of outlaw among cereal grains,” Gerstein, “Germanic Warg,” 131–­46, is a representative study in English and a key source for me. For more recent representative work, see Kershaw, “The One-­ Eyed God,” issued as a book in 2000 by Roger Pearson’s Institute for the Study of Man, a white supremacist, eugenicist publisher. For representative popular writing along these lines, see Taunton, “Of Wolves and Men,” published immediately after a post (February 11, 2017) advertising the “2017 Symposium of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum,” a far-­right organization with predicable views on “Western civilization” and race. Less troublesome work includes Spiedel, Ancient Germanic Warriors, although its positing of a unified Germanic culture from the Bronze Age through the Central Middle Ages was met with universal disdain

Notes to Chapter 2    183 from specialists in the field. For some lupine männerbünde, in sequence, see Grumeza, Dacia, 85: “The Phrygian word Daos and the Indo-­European word Dhawos, both meaning wolf, are pronounced similarly. Thus . . . the name for the Dacians meant the ‘wolf people’”; Marazov, “Philomele’s Tongue,” 142 (Scythians and Thracians); and Paul the Deacon, History of the Lombards, 1.11. 57. J. W. Thomas, Ortnit and Wolfdietrich. 58. Buchman and Erlingsson, Six Old Icelandic Sagas, 43–­61. 59. Freeman, “Romulus and Remus Story,” 9. Cathasaigh, Heroic Biography, 125. For further discussion, see McCone, Pagan Past and Christian Present, 191–­ 92, 215–­17. 60. Heist, Vitae sanctorum hiberniae, 118. Heist relies on the fourteenth-­ century Codex Salmanticensis, as he argues that its compilers meddled the least in the “truly primitive details” (xi) of these originally eleventh-­and twelfth-­ century saints’ lives. The earlier edition of Plummer, Vitae sanctorum hiberniae, I:46, which prefers to use the Codex Salmanticensis only “for the purpose of comparison” (xi), is still necessary and interesting, as the supposedly later material suppressed by Heist includes the king’s command to a servant to kill the boy, and the servant’s disobeying, because the Holy Spirit entered him (inspirante). 61. Heist, Vitae sanctorum hiberniae, 130; and Plummer, Vitae sanctorum hiberniae, 62–­63. 62. Thanks to Matthew Harrison for this and other important observations my chapter incorporates. 63. Ginzburg, “Mythologie Germanique et Nazisme,” 702–­3 (available in English in Ginzburg, Clues, Myths). With palpable frustration, Ginzburg observes that although Höfler’s methodological refusal to distinguish between myth, legend, and rite is effectively identical to that of Margaret Murray’s 1921 The Witch-­Cult in Western Europe, Murray’s work has been long discredited by scholars, while Höfler’s work “has met a different fate” (a connu un sort different; 706), with his theses still informing—­at least in the mid-­1980’s—­Germanic and even Iranian folklore studies. 64. For a neat articulation of this approach, see Liou-­Gille, “La fondation de Rome,” 72: “Abandonné aux fauves, nourri par une louvre (animal émanent des enfers), Romulus pénètre grâce à elle dans un autre monde, sauvage ou infernal” (Given over to wild animals, fed by a female wolf [an animal coming from the underworld], by means of her, Romulus enters into an otherworld, wild or infernal). See also Tennant, “Lupercalia,” 82: “It is also possible that this mythical idea emerged from the broader context of Man’s superstitious awe of wolves.” Tennant hypothesizes that the Lupercalia festival echoes a lost ceremony concerning young men and wolves: “The Luperci may have been ‘wolf-­impersonators’ who, by some ritual process,” perhaps the sacrifice of a dog, “acquired the necessary ‘awesomeness’ to keep evil spirits at bay.”

184    Notes to Chapter 2 65. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 1:17. 66. Gerstein, “Germanic Warg,” is key to the following discussion. The key argument of the first third of her article is to trace “an outlaw tradition so ancient as to be not merely Gmc., but I-­E [Germanic, but Indo-European}: that of the monstrous criminal, the outlaw as werwolf ” (134). 67. Justinus, Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, 38.6.7–­8, 241–­42. 68. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 1:10. His source may have been Dumézil, Mitra-­Varuna, 165, or Dumézil’s 1959 revision of his prewar study, in English translation as Gods of the Ancient Northmen, 45–­47. 69. McCone, “Werewolves, Cyclopes, Díberga and Fíanna,” 1–­22, especially 16–­19. 70. Hopkins, Melion and Biclarel. 71. McCone, “Aided Cheltchair Maic Uthechair,” 1–­30. 72. Jordan, “Count Robert’s ‘Pet’ Wolf,” 407. 73. Berechiah ha-­Nakdan, Fables of a Jewish Aesop, 7, which begins: “Once there was a lion, old and sick, whose loins were diseased, so that his spirit panted in travail.” 74. Lydgate, Isopes Fabules, l. 293. 75. Rodriguez-­Mayorgas, “Romulus, Aeneas,” 94. 76. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 63–­66. 77. Edward of Norwich, Master of Game, 61; and Marvin, Hunting Law and Ritual, 105. 78. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 920–­1045, is another key discussion of the common point and, like Agamben, may be traced in part back to theories of sov­ ereignty developed by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Of course, what Schmitt praised, Agamben and Derrida opposed. 79. See especially Pluskowski, Wolves and the Wilderness. 80. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 145–­46, and Moses and Monotheism, 130–­31. For a representative work on the inevitable obscene core of the paternal superego, see Žižek, Plague of Fantasies. 81. Pausanias, Description of Greece, 7.17.11, 3:269 (Attis), and 2.26.4–­5, 1:387 (Asclepius); Hyginus, Fabulae, fable 87, 81 (Aegisthus); Longus and Xenophon of Ephesus, Daphnis and Chloe, 1.2–­4, 17–­19; Hyginus, Fabulae, fable 186, 155 (Aeolus and Boeotus), and fable 187, 157 (Hippothous); Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 4.33.11, 2:451 (Telephus), and 3.58.1–­2, 2:271 (Cybele); Apollodorus, Library of Greek Mythology, 3.12.5, 125 (Paris), and 3.9.2, 116 (Atalante); Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, 2.4.4, 1:389 (Semiramis); Aelian, On the Characteristics of Animals, 12.21, 3:41 (Gilgamesh), to which he adds Achaemenes the Persian, here not snatched in mid-­air but only fed (“τρόφιμον” misleadingly rendered by Scholfield as “nursed”) by an eagle; Justinus, Epitome, 24.4–­7, 183 (Heiron): a series of animal portents follow, presaging his sovereignty—­as a schoolboy, a

Notes to Chapter 2    185 wolf grabs his writing-­tablet; as a young soldier, an eagle and owl settle on his arms; according to Aelian, Historical Miscellany, 12.45, 391, the Phrygians believe that Pindar was also bee-­fed as an exposed child, although this tradition is about his poetic inspiration rather than abandonment and care. 82. Herodotus, Persian Wars, 1.112, 1:145. 83. For a critique of common deconstructive habits, see Moi, “‘They Practice Their Trades,’” 812: “Derrida’s deconstructive concepts at once enact and deconstruct . . . ideality.” 84. McCracken, Skin of a Beast, 51, and throughout. 85. The passage deserves being quoted in full, in translation and its original: “The inevitable encounter with the ex-­wife and the punishment of the woman follow. What is important, however, is that Bisclavret’s final transformation back into a human takes place on the very bed of the sovereign” (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 1998, 108). “Segue l’immancabile incontro con l’ex moglie e la punizione della donna. Ma importante è che, alla fine, il ridiventar uomo di Bisclavret ha luogo sul letto stesso del sovrano” (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 2005, 120). 86. See especially McCracken, Skin of a Beast. 87. Dodds, “Dependence, Care, and Vulnerability,” 181. Her “Depending on Care,” is another good introduction to the field. The Vulnerability anthology nicely encapsulates the field’s ongoing refinements, with its attention, for example, to differences in dependency and vulnerability in different age groups, genders, nationalities, and racialized peoples. 88. Fineman, “Cracking the Foundational Myths,” 24. 89. Held, “Non-­Contractual Society,” 230; not infrequently anthologized, the essay was originally published in 1987. 90. Unsurprisingly, much of the field focuses on humans. For work that does otherwise, see in particular the opening chapters of Donovan, Aesthetics of Care, 1–­50; Gruen, Entangled Empathy; and especially Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care. 91. Yousef, Isolated Cases, 113. 92. Ross, Communal Luxury. 93. Kropotkin, Mutual Aid, 228. He will have presumably flamed out by the time my book appears, but for a modern analogue of such “biological” justifications for present hierarchies, see what was the cult of Jordan Peterson. 94. For the last two examples, see Lewis and Kahn, Education Out of Bounds, 41–­42. 95. For a brief and highly skeptical treatment, see Aroles, L’enigme des enfants-­ loups, 266–­68. 96. Procopius, History of the Wars, 6.17, 2:11–­15. For lists of ancient, medieval, and folkloric stories of feral children, see Dunn, Foundling and the Werwolf, 92–­106, whose twenty cases range from ancient Mesopotamia and China to the

186    Notes to Chapter 2 Amazon forest; McCartney, “Greek and Roman Lore,” 16–­28; and Carroll, “Folkloric Origins,” 66, 70–­73. Possibly the earliest such catalog appears in a list of eight famous animal-­nursed children in the third-­century Aelian, Historical Miscellany, 12.42, 387. Another early catalog is included in Alexander Ross’s response to Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia epidemica, his Arcana microcosmi, 4.2, 112–­13. On the Hesse story I discuss below, Ross truthfully remarks that “it is no more incredible for a Wolf to nurse a child, then for a Raven every day to feed Elijah.” 97. Tulp, Observationes medicae, 4.9, 312–­13 (in the 1672 and 1716 printings, 4.10); the first, 1641 edition of the book includes neither this story nor section 4 as a whole. 98. See Zhender, “La Lettre XXXIII,” 229–­30, for Zhender’s French translation of Nicolas’s Latin, p. 242 for his edition of the letter. 99. Translation, with slightly modified syntax, from Metzler, Fools and Idi­ ots?, 74: “In den wälden erzogen werdent vern von den vernünftigen läuten und lebent samt daz vieh.” 100. Albert the Great, On Animals, 1:308–­9. For the Latin, see Albertus Magnus, De animalibus libri XXVI, 1.2.4, 244. 101. For the wild man in a thirteenth-­century Latin text (Recension J2, the so-­called Orosius text) and an Old French prose translation, see Hilka, Der alt­ französische Prosa-­Alexanderroman, 202. For one fifteenth-­century text, see Wauquelin, Medieval Romance of Alexander, 213. 102. Schwann-­Baird, Valentin et Orson; Dickson, Valentine and Orson, 34–­38. For the wildness of Elias, the Swan Knight, see McCracken, Skin of a Beast, 136, and, in the same book, Tristan, 138–­56. Elias or Elyas first “turns wild” in thirteenth-­century versions of the story; see J. Williamson, “Elyas as Wild Man,” 193–­202. 103. Representative recent studies, which tend not to differentiate sharply between animal-­raised and isolated children, include: Candland, Feral Children and Clever Animals; Douthwaite, Wild Girl, Natural Man, 11–­69; Newton, Savage Girls and Wild Boys; Kidd, Making American Boys, 3–­7; Strivay, Enfants Sau­ vages; and Benzaquén, Encounters with Wild Children. Only Strivay and Benzaquén give much attention to the Middle Ages or acknowledge the Hesse child; most concentrate on Peter of Hanover, Victor of Aveyron, Kaspar Hauser, and the many cases that follow, for, as Yousef, “From the Wild Side,” 215, observes, “Enlightenment invented the wild child,” so to speak, in that a widespread interest in the topic appears only in the early eighteenth century. For a treatment of feral children in sympathy with mine, see Steeves, Things Themselves, 17–­47. For a representative diagnosis of autism or depression, see Carroll, “Folkloric Origins,” 67–­68, or for a related, much earlier assessment, which identifies as melancholiacs those who believe themselves to have been transformed into animals,

Notes to Chapter 2    187 see Camerarius, Operae horarum subcisivarum, 343–­46. For an English version, see Living Librarie, 277. Thank you to Eva Munz for turning me on to Memmie le Blanc. 104. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, 1:261. See McGuire, “Friends and Tales,” 242, conveniently reprinted along with another article on the oral sources of the Dialogus miraculorum in a variorum collection, McGuire, Friendship and Faith. 105. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, 2:249 (baptized dog), 1:317–­18 (singing monk). 106. Holder-­Egger, “Chronica S. Petri Erfordensis Moderna,” 326. 107. Holder-­Egger, 376. 108. Dilich, Hessische chronica, 175. For other tellings, see Camerarius, Operae horarum, 362–­63, which otherwise exactly copies the Chronica moderna, places both events in 1344; John Molle’s translation of Camerarius, Living librarie, 239–­ 40, dates both to 1543. Le Loyer, Discours et histoires, 140, which sets it in the time of “Louys de Baviere,” who could be any number of emperors, translates the long account faithfully, and then—­as one might expect of a work of this period—­concludes with a warning about the power of the devil to accomplish such work. I know of only one other medievalist who has written about the material: Ortalli, “Animal exemplaire et culture,” 41–­50, who cites the Hesse story as an index of changing medieval attitudes toward wolves and the natural world in general. 109. For fools in German courts, see Metzler, Fools and Idiots?; and Dussère and Thomas, Legend of Duke Ernst. 110. For ritual murder accusations, see Holder-­Egger, “Chronica S. Petri Erfordensis Moderna,” 289–­90 (in Mainz in 1285 and 1287) and 323 (in Weißensee, Thuringia, in 1303); and for mass suicides, see pp. 318–­19 (in Würzburg and Röttingen in 1298, during the Rintfleisch pogrom). 111. Jacques de Vitry, Exempla, 78. These early thirteenth-­century sermons belong to a four-­part collection including the sermons “De tempore,” “Sanctis,” and “Communes.” 112. For a rich and efficient treatment of what it calls the “erect bipedality” topos from the ancient Greeks through Aquinas, see Boyle, Senses of Touch, 32–­ 41. Also see the discussion in Steeves, Things Themselves, 21. 113. Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De rerum proprietatibus, 48. 114. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 46–­47n1. 115. Allen, On Farting, 37. 116. See, for example, Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 7.34, 3:59; and Albert the Great, On Animals, 2:1518. Browne’s Pseudodoxia epidemica, 99–­100, on this tidbit is worth quoting (and reading in full): “The ground or occasionall originall hereof, was probably the amazement and sudden silence, the expected

188    Notes to Chapter 2 appearance of Wolves doe often put upon travellers; not by a supposed vapour, or venemous emanation, but a vehement fear which naturally produceth obmutescence; and sometimes irrecoverable silence.” 117. Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 13. 118. Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 91. 119. Ahmed, 54. 120. Ahmed, 12. 121. Ahmed, 17. 122. Marie de France, Fables, fable 50, lines 24–­25, my translation. 123. Marie de France, fable 82. 124. Cf. Steeves, Things Themselves, 31, whose sensitive observations on the postures of Amala and Kamala notice—­as would be expected before recent dialectical developments in the social model of disability—­that the “body is a social construct.” 125. Things Themselves, 20, again is in alignment with my work, although his observation that feral children stories “ultimately challenge the boundaries of our communities in many ways” does not quite get to the point of anthropophagy. 126. Representative suspicious readings of community can be found in Esposito, Bíos; Butler, Frames of War; and, with considerable cautions regarding its historical and cultural specificity and political purposes, Afro-­pessimist critiques of group formation. See, for example, the anonymous introduction to Afro-­Pessimism, 9: “Blackness . . . is the dark matter surrounding and holding together the categories of non-­Black,” which necessarily “problematizes any positive affirmation of identity.” 127. Holder-­Egger, “Chronica S. Petri Erfordensis Moderna,” 262. 128. Albert the Great, On Animals, 2:1519 (De animalibus libri XXVI, 2:1410). 129. Steel, How to Make a Human, 118–­35. 130. Abumrad and Krulwich, “Shy Baboon.” 131. For a clear articulation of these points, and an insistence that humans must necessarily take responsibility for acting on the basis of their limited power, see Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene. 132. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 97. See also her When Species Meet, 74: “The ecologies of significant others involve messmates at table, with indigestion and without the comfort of teleological purpose from above, below, in front, or behind. This is not some kind of naturalistic reductionism; this is about living responsively as mortal beings where dying and killing are not optional.”

3. Food for Worms 1. Quoted in Gray, Themes and Images, 186. 2. From the introduction to Raoul de Houdenc, Songe d’Enfer, 17. 3. Milton, Paradise Lost, 4.76–­77.

Notes to Chapter 3    189 4. Quincey, Note Book, 293. 5. Muehlberger, “The Legend of Arius’ Death,” 3–­29; Boyarin, Siege of Jeru­ salem, 32; and “The Awntyrs off Arthur,” lines 105–­23. 6. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 32 and 64. See also Shotwell, Against Purity, 122. 7. Far more thorough and dedicated discussions can be found, for example, in Rooney, Mortality and Imagination; and Kinch, Imago Mortis. 8. For text and brief commentary, see Mooney et al., “Digital Index of Middle English Verse” [hereafter DIMEV], 6292; and Fein, Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 2. The poem might be contrasted with a short poem on the same thing, but more neatly moral and anthropocentric: DIMEV 1166, in which “erth goyth vpon erth al glysteryng in gold . . . and yet must erth to erth soner than he wold.” 9. Rudd, Greenery, 22. 10. Rudd, 25. 11. Derrida, Gift of Death, 41. 12. For the phrase’s vast popularity, see Cerquiglini-­Toulet, “Les vers comme heritiers,” 349n3. 13. Quoted in Woolf, English Religious Lyric. 14. Quoted in Gray, Medieval English Religious Lyric, 206–­7. 15. Conlee, Middle English Debate Poetry. Here I acknowledge the deservedly well-­known study Fuss, “Corpse Poem,” 1–­30, while also noting its poor fit for treating medieval poetry: Fuss concentrates on modern poetry and its refined, hieratic status. Medieval poetry, by contrast, was often far more demotic and her almost exclusively Anglophone narrative (particularly on p. 4) of the history of speaking corpses simply ignores the Middle Ages and its translingual literary and religious cultures (see especially 4n5). 16. For a brief treatment of the manuscript and its likely contexts, see Richards, “Writing and Silence,” 168–­70. The manuscript is available in a full-­color digitization on the British Library website; the poem covers ff. 33r–­35r. 17. Histories of the genre are easy to come by. One of the best is in Raskolnikov, Body against Soul, 62–­63, 71–­72. 18. Here the poem becomes garbled, with perhaps two of its seven-­line rhyme royal stanzas missing between the description of the tomb and the narrator’s ravishment; Conlee, Middle English Debate Poetry, 53n22–­28. 19. Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, 221–­27; Bynum, “Material Continuity,” 203, 237; K. Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol, 29–­30; Gray, Themes and Images, 191–­92; Hennessy, “Remains of the Royal Dead,” 310–­54; Malvern, “An Earnest ‘Monyscyon,’” 415–­50; Tristram, Figures of Life and Death, 160–­61; Woolf, English Religious Lyric, 328–­30. 20. The classic treatment is Kristeva, Powers of Horror, for example, 15: “The abject shatters the wall of repression and its judgments. It takes the ego back to

190    Notes to Chapter 3 its source on the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away.” For a good summary of the tradition and feminist developments, see Raskolnikov, Body against Soul, 25–­26. Dekkers, Way of All Flesh, 103, unwittingly illustrates the very cultural symptoms Kristeva describes: “Generally, it’s easier to tell a group of Chinese people apart than it is a circle of little old ladies from Florida,” here remarking on cosmetics, among many such appalling assessments, fatally marring a book so eager to be a modern version of Thomas Browne’s Urne-­Buriall. 21. British Museum Additional 37049, 48v. See also a similarly hirsute Mary Magdalene, ascending to heaven, on 50v. 22. For the gendered complexities of body, flesh, and spirit, see Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, 26–­34; and, at length, Lochrie, Margery Kempe. 23. For other comments on the poem’s multi-­gendered identifications, see Robertson, “Kissing the Worm,” 138 (“the dreamer is ravished and raped by his vision,” which anticipates what Robertson argues the Body suffers from the worms); Matlock, “Feminine Flesh,” 267 (“the initial image of the woman’s figure unites the anonymous narrator with the unknown woman”). 24. Doty, “British Museum Manuscript Additional 37049,” 489, 87r. I have been unable to consult the other edition of the compilation, likewise available only in an unpublished dissertation: Streeter, “British Museum Additional MS 37049.” 25. Raskolnikov, Body against Soul, 62. Schultz, “Heterosexuality as a Threat,” 14: “If homosexuality was not a ‘recognized concept’ in the Middle Ages, then heterosexuality wasn’t either.” 26. For an allied point, see Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 52, summarizing Carol Clover’s discussion of slasher films: “The adolescent boys who make up the primary audience for slasher films are able to identify with the victim while at the same time her female body creates a needed distance between that maso­ chism and the viewer.” 27. Robertson, “Kissing the Worm,” 141–­42. 28. For a summary of fifteenth-­century controversies about the Carthusian diet, see Fleming, “When ‘Meats Are Like Medicines,’” 101–­3. 29. Doty, “British Museum Manuscript Additional 37049,” 184, 28r. 30. Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, 132. 31. Robertson, “Kissing the Worm,” 141. 32. Though the “we” in the following is true, I am wary of it: Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 97, “We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist. Critters—­human and not—­become-­with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and

Notes to Chapter 3    191 unworlding.” See similar statements at pp. 32, 55, and 101–­2. As much as I embrace her ontology and politics, Haraway rather has her foot on the scale in her praise for sympoietic becomings and disdain for anthropocentric refusals to involute: the former tend to be represented by queer, anticolonialist, antiracist art, while the latter is represented, for example, by Eichmann himself (“who could not be a wayfarer, could not entangle,” 36). 33. To be precise, Barker, “Stone and Bone,” 114–­16, emphasizes that the poem’s dreamer can see the tomb’s corpse only in his vision; the manuscript illustrates what resembles a transi tomb, but the poem’s narrative does not. 34. Ralph Hamsterley represented himself like this on his sixteenth-­century shroud brass; see K. Cohen, Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol, plate 37. 35. For the British fashion for these monuments, and an argument against the notion that they had anything to do with the plague or heterodoxy, see King, “Cadaver Tomb in England” 26–­38, and “‘My Image,’” 294–­314. 36. Woolf, English Religious Lyric, 318–­19. Mooney et al., DIMEV 3624. 37. See, for example, Fudge, “The Dog, the Home,” 37–­54; Simmons, “Shame,” 25–­42; Bruns, On Ceasing to Be Human, 79–­97; Fraiman, “Pussy Panic versus Liking Animals,” 89–­115; Freccero, “Checher la chatte,” 105–­20. 38. Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 13. 39. Derrida, 6. 40. Derrida, 9. 41. Fudge, “The Dog, the Home.” 42. For the French, compare, for example, Derrida, “L’animal,” 253, “devant un chat qui vous regarde sans bouger” (before a male cat who looks at you without moving), 255–­56, “le chat qui me regarde nu . . . ce chat dont je parle, qui est aussi une chatte” (the male cat who looks at me naked, the male cat about whom I speak, who is also a female cat), and 257, “la chatte qui me regarde nu, celle-­là et nulle autre, celle dont je parle ici” (the female cat who looks at me naked, that female one there and no other, the female one about whom I am speaking here; emphasis in original). For recent good appreciations of gender and Derrida, with special attention to cats, see Freccero, “Chercher la chatte”; and Polish, “After Alice,” 180–­96. 43. Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 9. 44. Haraway, When Species Meet, 20–­21. 45. Thomas, Ortnit and Wolfdietrich, 36–­38. 46. Representative treatments include Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 113–­18; D. Clark, “Last Kantian’” 41–­74; Menely, Animal Claim, 37; Hantel, “Bobby between Deleuze and Levinas,” 105–­26, who, at p. 112, does observe: “Relays exist in the snake or the dog that disarticulate the human faciality machine and open us up to new ethical possibilities.” Of course, the snake throws the gears of this machine rather more severely than the dog.

192    Notes to Chapter 3 47. Lévinas, “Paradox of Morality,” 171–­72. 48. Nagy and Johnson, Trash Animals, in a practical, unphilosophical way, begins to rectify the omission. For a similar critical move, on the problem of the “individual bee,” see Botelho, “Honey, Wax, and Dead Bee,” 102–­3. 49. Moore and Kosut, Buzz. For representative work in early modern bees, see M. Campbell, “Busy Bees,” 619–­42; Woolfson, “Renaissance of Bees,” 281–­ 300; Campana, “Bee and the Sovereign?,” 94–­113; and Botelho, “Honey, Wax, and Dead Bee.” 50. For example, see Ransome, Sacred Bee, 215. 51. Gervase of Tilbury, Otia imperialia,” 55. 52. Gerald of Wales, Journey through Wales, 169–­70. 53. See several analogous points in Serres, Parasite, treated in more detail in the next chapter. 54. Quoted in Rooney, Mortality and Imagination, 33. 55. The Electronic Middle English Dictionary, based on Robert E. Lewis (gen. ed.), University of Michigan, 1953–­2001, “in” (adv.) and “in” (prep.), 8a and 8b. University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service, 2001. http:// quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/. 56. Old English translations and glosses of Boethius’s Consolation of Philoso­ phy had similarly expansive lists of vermin: see Cavell, “Arachnophobia and Early English Literature,” 25–­26. 57. Morton, Ecological Thought, 36. 58. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 112–­13. For several more, see Thacker, Dust of This Planet, 7; Haraway, When Species Meet, 220, and Staying with the Trouble, 66; and Fishel, Microbial State. 59. Isidore, Etymologies, 12.18, 259. 60. Basil of Caesarea, Letters and Select Works, 9.2, 102. 61. Stavrianeas, “Spontaneous Generation in Aristotle’s Biology,” 308; J. Smith, “La génération spontanée,” 277. 62. Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, 767b, 401. For a sustained, queer feminist engagement with this text, see Bianchi, Feminine Symptom. 63. My discussion is largely guided by Lugt, Le ver. Several good studies on spontaneous generation and affiliated topics in Early Modern Europe are available: Fissell, “Imagining Vermin,” 1–­29; Geisweidt, “‘Nobleness of Life,’” 89–­103; Knoeff, “Animals Inside,” 1–­19; MacInnes, “Politic Worm,” 253–­73; Raber, “Vermin and Parasites,” 13–­32. For a superb treatment of eighteenth-­century debates on spontaneous generation, see Sandford, “Spontaneous Generation,” 15–­26. 64. Aristotle, Historia animalium, 5.19.550a. 65. Albert the Great, Aristotle’s “On Animals,” 110. 66. Trevisa, On the Properties of Things, respectively vol. 2, 18.48, 1239; 18.70, 1222; 18.47, 1198; 18.49, 1240; 18.115, 1264. Citations are to book, chapter, and page number.

Notes to Chapter 3    193 67. Basil of Caesarea, Select Works, 9.2, 102. 68. Isidore, Etymologies, 12.8, 269. 69. Augustine, City of God, 15.27, 518–­19. Genesis includes two distinct accounts of God’s command to fill the Ark; 7:2, unlike 6:19, omits the command to gather “omni reptili” (all creeping things). 70. See, for example, Fournié, L’iconographie de la Bible historiale, and, more generally, Zahlten, Creatio mundi. I thank Aden Kumler and Ittai Weinryb for their expert art historical assistance. 71. Lugt, Le ver, 137. 72. Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 98. 73. Albert the Great, Aristotle’s “On Animals,” 528–­29. 74. Augustine, On the Holy Trinity, 3.8.13, 60. 75. Augustine, Literal Meaning of Genesis, 90. 76. See especially Latour, Pasteurization of France; and Farley, Spontaneous Generation Controversy; Roll-­Hansen, “Death of Spontaneous Generation,” 481–­ 519; and Roe, Matter, Life, and Generation. 77. Quoted in Farley and Gieson, “Science, Politics and Spontaneous Generation,” 197. 78. Pasteur’s speech, delivered on April 7, 1864, was reprinted as “Des Générations spontanées,” available at http://www.rc.usf.edu/~levineat/pasteur.pdf, translation modified slightly by me. 79. Cudworth, True Intellectual System, 148. 80. Ruestow, “Leeuwenhoek,” 225–­48. H. Harris, Things Come to Life, 22, quotes Leeuwenhoek, arguing that everything, “however small it may be,” depends upon the first Creation. 81. See, for example, the embarrassment in Harris, Things Come to Life, 22, 25, over Francesco Redi’s and Antonio Vallisnieri’s Roman Catholicism. 82. Kessler, “Intellective Soul,” 487. For further consideration of Blaise, whose works remain largely unavailable in modern editions, see Lugt, Le ver, 176–­81. Two other Christian thinkers who make a similar point slightly predate Blaise: these are John Euclem of the University of Leipzig and Nicholas of Amsterdam of the University of Rostock; see Pluta, “‘Lumine naturali,’” 85–­106. For a still earlier (Muslim) thinker, Ibn Tufail’s early twelfth-­century philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan, written in Iberia, also allows for the possibility that humans could be generated spontaneously. To demonstrate that religious truths could be arrived at independently through reason, Tufail had to preserve his reasoner from all cultural influence: hence, a spontaneously generated baby, on a remote and torrid equatorial island. Its late seventeenth-­century Latin translation, Philo­ sophicus autodidactus, gave the work new life. 83. Lawn, Rise and Decline, 58–­59; and Federici-­Vescovini, “Image et repré­ sentation optique,” 357–­75.

194    Notes to Chapter 3 84. Quoted (and translation used) from Pluta, “Lumine naturali,” 91, itself from Blaise of Parma, Le Quaestiones, 79. Pluta observes that while Blaise allowed that humans and their souls could be spontaneously generated, and therefore mortal, Blaise also allows that God could intervene to grant us immortality. 85. Quoted from, and translation based on the French of, Lugt, Le ver, 178 n206. 86. For later thinking with some resemblance to Blaise, see J. Smith, “La génération spontanée,” 282–­83, who observes that Martin Luther noted that Adam had been created from mud, but that with the creation of Eve, future generations of humans would reproduce sexually, like other animals. 87. J. J. Cohen, Stone, 22–­23. 88. Pereto, Bada, and Lazcano, “Charles Darwin,” 395–­406. 89. The following account is indebted to Lazcano, “What Is Life?,” 1–­15; Penny, “Interpretive Review,” 633–­7 1; Raulin-­Cerceau, “Historical Review,” 15–­ 33; and Schummer, “Creation of Life,” 125–­42. 90. Nietzsche, Anti-­Christ, 169–­70. 91. For a monumental critique of the distinction between life itself and the living, see Thacker, After Life. 92. The anti-­Lacanian, antirepresentational engagement with Deleuze found in Bray and Colebrook, “Haunted Flesh,” 35–­67, is a key reference here in its wholesale assault on “the persistence of the notion of the body as a privileged anteriority” (44; also see 56). 93. Of course, none of these observations would be possible without Spinoza, Diderot, Bergson, Deleuze, and so forth. 94. All three poems are edited in Conlee, Middle English Debate Poetry. 95. See Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness, 323, for the work, editions, and studies. 96. Doty, “Museum Manuscript Additional 37049,” 461. 97. Compare Robertson, “Kissing the Worm,” 126: “The corpse that speaks is animated by a soul, of course, because it is a soul that allows it to speak.” See Matlock, “Feminine Flesh,” 274, “The soul never appears,” which leads Matlock to conclude that the Soul is present indistinguishably with Body. Also see Terrell, “Rethinking the ‘Corse in Clot,’” 437 n14: “The soul appears to remain with the body [in the Disputation], awaiting a judgment.” For further context, see Maddern, “Murdering Souls and Killing Bodies,” 25–­45, which tracks how bodies and souls sometimes “swap essential characteristics” in late medieval writing. 98. Bataille, Erotism, 56–­57. 99. For one version of this point, see MacInnes, “Politic Worm,” 259. 4. Food for Birds 1. For representative studies of early burial, which I offer here without any pretensions toward resolving debates in disciplines outside my own: The oldest

Notes to Chapter 4    195 grave we currently know of may date to 90,000–­120,000 years ago, according to Burdukiewicz, “Origin of Symbolic Behavior,” 398–­405; for more on burial among other species of homo, see Sandgathe et al., “Roc De Marsal Neandertal Child,” 243–­53, which demonstrates that the child was probably not deliberately buried, and proposes that all claims for Neanderthal intentional burial should be reevaluated; but cf. Rendu et al., “Intentional Neandertal Burial,” 81–­86, where there may have been a dug burial pit—­notably, the bones here are less gnawed upon than those of contemporary nonhumans. Bello et al., “Upper Palaeo­ lithic Ritualistic Cannibalism,” 170–­89, argues that evidence of primary burial is “prac­tically non-­existent” in Europe 12,000–­15,000 years ago; Hoffmann et al., “Homo Aurignaciensis Hauseri, 213, notes the absence of any “early modern human burials . . . in Europe before the middle Upper Paleolithic”; but see Carretero et al., “Magdalenian Human Remains,” 10–­27, which argues that this site offers evidence of what may be a high-­status individual from 18,000 years ago. 2. For representative studies, see P. Brown, Cult of the Saints; and Daniell, Death and Burial. 3. Augustine, “Care to Be Taken,” 6.8, 361–­62. For a detailed treatment, see Rose, Commentary. 4. Augustine, “Care to Be Taken,” 7.9, 364. 5. Augustine, 2.4, 356. 6. Augustine, 13.16, 373–­74. 7. “De cura pro mortuis gerenda,” in PL 40:609. 8. Treffort, L’Eglise carolingienne et la mort, 23. 9. Benedictus Levita, Collectio capitularium, PL 97:749C. See Kéry, Canoni­ cal Collections, 117–­22. 10. Gerald of Wales, Vita S. Remigii, 102. Also see pp. 98–­99 for further burial stories. 11. For example, see Daniell, Death and Burial, 17–­18. 12. Brault, Song of Roland. 13. Thomas of Kent, Anglo-­Norman Alexander. 14. Thomas de Cantimpré, Bonum universale de apibus, 2.30, 312. 15. Catlin, Letters and Notes, 89–­90. For a comparable practice, see O’Shea, Archaeology and Ethnohistory, 143–­45. For more on the worldwide practice of exhumation, see Boret, Japanese Tree Burial, 2–­3. 16. Jonuks and Konsa, “Revival of Prehistoric Burial Practices,” 91–­110. 17. Naumann, Japanese Prehistory, 75. 18. My thanks to my colleague Mobina Hashmi for alerting me to this practice. 19. M. Smith, “Bones Chewed by Canids,” 671–­85. 20. Testart, “Des crânes et des vautours,” 33–­58. 21. Bynum, “Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology,” 341–­68.

196    Notes to Chapter 4 22. De Jong, Traditions of the Magi, 432–­35, 444–­46; Boyce, Textual Sources; and Davies, Death, Burial, and Rebirth, 40–­46. 23. His Epicurian philosophy survives in collections of extracts produced from the classical through the early modern periods, although the anecdote, drawn from the fifth-­century Greek collection by Joannes Stobaeus, seems to have been unknown to the Latin Middle Ages: here I cite from Lykosthenes, Apophtegmatum, 988. See also Diogenes the Cynic, Sayings and Anecdotes, 81. For a related anecdote in a widely copied compilation, drawn from the lost mid-­ twelfth-­century Diogenes translation by Henricus Aristippus, see Walter of Burley, Liber de vita, 212: Diogenes tells his disciples that when he dies, he is to be left out unburied; when they tell him that dogs will devour his corpse, he says not to worry: he has a staff to beat the dogs away if they come near. But, they asked, how will you be aware of them? He replied: If I’m unaware, what do I care what happens to me? Note, however, that’s Stobaeus’s anecdote is about burial cultures, while the other anecdote scorns all custom, community, or ceremony. 24. Herodotus, Persian Wars, 1.140, 179. 25. Huff, “Archaeological Evidence,” 602. 26. Huff, 618. 27. Strabo, Geography, 7.15.20, 183–­85, and 5.11.3, 283. 28. Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 4.21, 267. 29. Plutarch, Moralia, 6:371. 30. Eusebius, La préparation évangélique [Preparation for the Gospel], 1.4.6–­ 7, 123–­25: “Ni jeter aux chiens ni aux oiseaux leur morts. . . . car c’étaient là, et dans milles autres pratiques analogues, les coutumes qui souillaient l’existence des humains.” This edition is the most recent, best edition of Eusebius’s Greek original; translation from the French translation is mine, checked against a (late nineteenth-­century) English translation. 31. Theodoret of Cryus, Cure for Pagan Maladies, 9.33. 32. Procopius, History of the Wars, 1.1.12.3–­5, 97. 33. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 1.45, 129. 34. Sextus Empiricus, Skeptic Way, 3.227, 202. 35. Schaff and Wace, Select Library, Against Jovinianus, 6.2.7, 393–­94. Translation slightly modified. The point about Stasanor also appears in Porphyry, On Abstinence from Killing Animals, 118. 36. Bardesanes, “Book of the Laws,” 8:732; and Pseudo-­Clementine, Recogni­ tions, 8.9.25, 188. 37. Delehaye, Les versions grecques, 460–­61. 38. Agathias Scholasticus of Myrina, Historiarum, 112–­13; 132–­33. Much more recent, and presumably more authoritative. editions of the Greek original exist; I cite this one for ease of use, because Nieburh provides a translation, into Latin, in his footnotes.

Notes to Chapter 4    197 39. Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, 71. For his comments on Eusebius, see p. 586. 40. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 14.3.12, 286. 41. For example, see Bibliothèque nationale de France lat. 1801, 57r, a twelfth-­ century manuscript. Not counting excerpts (like those used for Chaucer’s prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale), at least eighty-­seven manuscripts of Jerome’s work survive: Silvia and Brennan, “Medieval Manuscripts,” 161–­66. 42. The sermon is adapted by Paul the Deacon from one pseudonymously ascribed to Chrysostom: Homily 74, “De uno martyre,” PL 195: 1542D–­43A; and Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum quadruplex sive speculum maius, historiale, 1.86, 32, “De moribus extraneis quarundam gentium” (On the Customs of Foreign Peoples). 43. Erasmus, Adagia, 6.55, 647. 44. PL 24:162C–­D. 45. PL 116:792C–­793A. 46. PL 198:1452D. For the work’s spread, see Clark, Making of the Historia Scholastica. 47. Caxton, Game and Playe, I.7–­9. 48. This and all subsequent citations of the Speculum humanae salvationis are all from digitized manuscripts, all easily accessible online: Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. germ. fol. 245 48r, and Bibliothèque nationale de France, Latin 511, 26r. 49. British Library, Ms Douce 204 25v and Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, Codex 206(49) 25r. 50. Bibliothèque nationale de France Latin 9585, 30v, and Biblioteca Aposto­ lica Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1806 31v. 51. Sarnen, Benediktinerkollegium, Cod. membr. 8, f 26r. 52. For example, sixteen manuscripts of the early fifteenth-­century La chro­ nique anonyme universelle jusqu’à la mort de Charles VII include a rondel illustrating Evilmerodach’s dismemberment. My thanks to Lisa Fagin Davis for this information; for more, see her La Chronique Anonyme Universelle. 53. Gouin, Tibetan Rituals of Death, 65. For Odoric’s journey, with a hypothesis that he actually visited Tibet, see Liščák, “Odoric of Pordenone,” 63. 54. Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, 251–­54. 55. Dawson, Mission to Asia, 143. 56. Friedman and Figg, Trade, Travel, and Exploration, 309; and Phillips, Before Orientalism, 58. 57. Phillips, Before Orientalism, 41. 58. Odoric de Pordenone, Les voyages en Asie, 450–­52. 59. For example, see Schalow, Incarnality of Being, 112; Garrard, Ecocriticism, 31–­32. For representative critiques, see Žižek, On Belief, 10; Wolfe, Before the

198    Notes to Chapter 4 Law, 40; Morton, Ecology without Nature, 58; and Tyler, “Like Water in Water,” 273. 60. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 252 and 260. 61. For more critiques on Heidegger’s pastoralism and disgust with cosmopolitanism, see Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots; and Trawny, Heidegger. 62. Serres, Parasite, 24 and 26. 63. The classic critique of the American funeral industry is Mitford, Ameri­ can Way of Death. For a critique both of the industry, and of Mitford’s sin­gleminded, and unsentimental promotion of cremation, see Doughty, From Here to Eternity. For a representative scholarly treatment of the development of embalming in American funeral practices, see Fernandez, “American Necrospecialists,” 350–­83. 64. Alfaro, In Ictu Oculi. The most famous work bearing this title is a c. 1671 vanitas by Juan de Valdés Leal in the Hospital de la Caridad, Seville. 65. Hegarty, Alternative Histories. 66. For a key treatment of Wentz’s “romantic Orientalism,” see Donald S. Lopez Jr.’s forward to Evans-­Wentz, Tibetan Book of the Dead. For a contrasting view from roughly the same era, see Kawaguchi, Three Years in Tibet, 392–­93; Kawaguchi, disgusted, calls the Tibetans descendants of “a tribe of fiendish cannibals who used to feed on human flesh; and what I witnessed at the burial convinced me that, even at the present day, they retained the horrible habit of their ancestors.” 67. For a comparable colonialist function of “nature,” see Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, 75: “The Black Man,” even for abolitionists, “was the living symbol of ancient humanity, happy and simple.” 68. Matthiessen, Snow Leopard, 231. 69. Chu, “Sky Burial,” 560; Citino, “Sky Burial,” 6; Praisner, “Earth and Sky Burials,” 102; Holmgren, “Sky Burial,” 244; Pereira, “Sky Burial,” 21; Dorris, “Sky Burial,” 31; Kootnikoff, “Sky Burial”; Harrison, “Sky Burial,” 116; and Weinstein, “Sky Burial,” 572. 70. For more, see Thill, Waste. 71. See Lee’s TED talk “My Mushroom Burial Suit.” For more information, see http://coeio.com/ and Banerji, “Mushroom Death Suit.” 72. Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another’s Word; and Phillips, Before Orientalism. 73. J. Cohen, Living Letters of the Law. 74. Dawson, Mission to Asia, 142. 75. For alternate interpretations of the ritual’s presentation in Mandeville, see Householder, Inventing Americans, 46 (a “grotesque parody of Christian practice”); and Heng, Empire of Magic, 246, who, by reading it in terms of the “narrative pleasure imparted by forbidden behavior,” links it to the many other “cannibalism” customs in Mandeville.

Notes to Chapter 5    199 76. Foreign Travels. 77. Higgins, Book of John Mandeville, 182. This is the insular French version, which is possibly the earliest Mandeville. 78. Kohanski and Benson, Book of John Mandeville, lines 2770–­83; Seymour, Mandeville’s Travels, 224; Seymour, Egerton Version of Mandeville’s Travels, 167; and Seymour, Metrical Version of Mandeville’s Travels, lines 2826–­29. 79. Seymour, Mandeville’s Travels, 225. 80. For an extended treatment, see Derrida, Gift of Death. 81. Branch, Nothing Left to Take Away. 5. Oysters 1. See especially Gillis, Human Shore. 2. The first such work may be a fourth-­century poetic letter in praise of oysters in all their sybaritic variety, by Ausonius to Paulinus of Nola, in Ausonius, Volume II, letter V, 12–­17. For a sampling of modern oyster books, see Brennan, Oyster War; Kurlansky, Big Oyster; Stott, Oyster; Walsh, Sex, Death, and Oysters; and Wennersten, Oyster Wars of Chesapeake Bay. For the libretto of a comic opera about the Chesapeake Bay Oyster Wars, see Duncan, “Driven from the Seas.” 3. For a sampling of oyster facts, see the following New York Times articles, which all appeared after Hurricane Sandy hit the city: Revkin, “Students Press the Case”; Feuer, “Protecting New York City”; Quenqua, “Oyster Shells.” See also “Living Breakwaters Design and Implementation.” Flood abatement infrastructure for Tottenville, Staten Island, began construction in 2018. 4. For his oyster opinions, see Singer, Animal Liberation, 188; and Cox, “Consider the Oyster.” 5. Crook and Walters, “Nociceptive Behavior and Physiology,” 188–­89. Further study in mollusks and pain have tended to focus, understandably, on octopuses, squids, and sea slugs; see for example, Sneddon, “Pain in Aquatic Animals,” 971–­73; but also Lewbart and Mosley, “Clinical Anesthesia and Analgesia,” 64, which summarizes research from the 1990s on using a 1 percent solution of propylene phenoxetol to relax oysters into opening their shells. 6. For a treatment for the general public by an “ostrovegan” scientist (albeit an evolutionary psychologist, not a mollusk expert), see Fleischman, “Ethical Case.” 7. For one version of the argument, see Bekoff, “Vegans and Oysters,” 263–­66. 8. Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd ed., 174. 9. Descartes, Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 304, and Oeuvres, 4:576. 10. Descartes, Discourse on Method, 33, and Oeuvres, 4:59. 11. For a particularly smart example, see Shannon, Accommodated Animal.

200    Notes to Chapter 5 12. Wolfe, Before the Law. 13. Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 9, 13. 14. Despret, What Would Animals Say? I am disappointed to have to note the absence of oysters (mussels, yes; oysters, no) from an early sociological study of nonhumans, Hachet-­Souplet, Les sociétés d’animaux. 15. This is true even for Stott, Oyster, the only literary/cultural theory volume on the oyster I know, which is otherwise quite good on nineteenth-­and twentieth-­ century Anglophone writing. 16. Higden and Trevisa, Polychronicon, 2:179. 17. Higden and Trevisa, 181. For similar statements, see Aquinas, Summa con­ tra gentiles, 2.68, “How an Intellectual Substance Can Be the Form of the Body”; and Weemes, Portraiture, 56–­57. 18. For “nonfinite,” see Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 5: “The list of ‘what is proper to man’ always forms a configuration, from the first moment. For that very reason, it can never be limited to a single trait and it is never closed; structurally speaking it can attract a nonfinite number of other concepts, beginning with the concept of a concept.” 19. For representative statements on the generation of oysters, see Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 9.74, 3:273, and 10.87, 3:413. See Grosseteste, Six Days, 195 (for “like from like”); and Buttes, Dyets Dry Dinner. For chastity, as part of a debate in which bees, geese, flax, oysters, and other things argue over which provides more service to humans, see Maier, Lusus Serius (1654), 35–­36. The Latin original is Maier, Lusus Serius (1619), 23. 20. The quotation is from one account of the Lenten costume John Gladman supposedly wore for his January 25, 1443, revolt in Norwich; cited in Humphrey, Politics of Carnival, 66. 21. For Aquinas, see n17 above. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, V, prose 5. 22. Marder, Plant-­Thinking, 22. Immediately subsequent quotations are from pp. 22, 63, and 37. 23. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 9.71, 3:267: “nullum esse sensum, ut ostreis.” 24. Cottin-­Bizonne, “Une nouvelle édition.” For a more easily accessible edition, see Walberg, Le bestiaire. The edition in Wright, Popular Treatises on Sci­ ence, should be avoided; Walberg observes that Wright “quelquefois mal lu,” which holds true for the section on pearls and oysters too. Cottin-­Bizonne’s notes cite Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies and the Physiologus, but neither of these works includes Philippe’s subjunctive assessment of the oyster’s vitality, nor anything about the oyster’s intentionality. 25. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 198. 26. Leader, “Lacan’s Myths,” 45–­47.

Notes to Chapter 5    201 27. O. Harris, Lacan’s Return to Antiquity, 75, quoting Richard Boothby’s 1991 Lacan commentary. O. Harris, 67–­75, is a particularly thorough account of the mythographic character of this Lacanian image. 28. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 197. 29. Žižek, Parallax View, 118. 30. For an exemplary championing of putrefaction, see Woodard, Slime Dynamics. 31. Plato, Gorgias, 494b, 837. 32. Olympiodorus the Younger of Alexandria, Commentary on Plato’s Gor­ gias, 210. To the best of my knowledge, this habit is recorded nowhere else in ancient natural history. Other accounts of the charadrios—­Hugh of Fouilloy, for example (De bestiis et aliis rebus, PL 177:77C)—­speak instead of its diagnostic and curative potency: if it is brought to a sick person, and turns its head away, this is a certain sign that the person will die, but otherwise, it can suck out the sickness from the patient’s mouth and fly towards the sun to burn it up. For a charming illustration, see Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, 3516, 199v, a thirteenth-­ century French prose bestiary easily accessible through the Gallica website. 33. Tarnopolsky, Prudes, Perverts, and Tyrants, 22. 34. Plato, Philebus, 21d, 409. 35. See Klibansky, Continuity of the Platonic Tradition, and the four volumes, overseen by Klibansky, of Plato Latinus, comprising medieval translations of Meno, Phaedo, Parmenides, and Timaeus, by far the most widely read of these. 36. Ficino, Philebus Commentary, 316. 37. Liddell and Scott, A Greek-­English Lexicon, s.v., “πλεύμων” and “πνεύμων.” 38. Diderot, “Innate,” Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert. Originally published as “Inné,” Encyclopédie, 8:754. Diderot makes similar observations in Rameau’s Nephew and d’Alembert’s Dream, 219. 39. Diderot, “Pleasure,” Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert. Originally published as “Plaisir,” Encyclopédie 12:691. 40. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 5.5, 417. 41. Heller-­Roazen, Inner Touch, 36, 45, 120. 42. Heller-­Roazen, 40, 62. 43. For an exemplary discussion of resistance and unpredictability as a key feature of “life,” see Wolfe, Before the Law, 32. 44. Citations, respectively, from Agamben, Use of Bodies, 222, 22, and 28, Highest Poverty, 26, and Homo Sacer (1998), 164. 45. Freud, Freud Reader, 575. 46. Marder, “Smart as an Oak?” 47. For a brief statement on the “scandal of the cephalopods,” see Wolfe, Before the Law, 71. Two recent books on this “scandal” include Montgomery, Soul of an Octopus; and Godfrey-­Smith, Other Minds.

202    Notes to Chapter 5 48. Shaviro, Universe of Things, 48. 49. “Animacy” is the focus of Chen, Animacies. Volcanic depths is a favored metaphor of Graham Harman: see, inter alia, Towards Speculative Realism. 50. Despret, What Would Animals Say?, 38–­44. 51. Shaviro, Universe of Things, 48. 52. K. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 419n27. 53. Morrison, Literature of Waste, 125. 54. Mitchell, Becoming Human, 62. 55. J. Cohen, Stone. The book uses both conjunctions frequently. 56. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 99. 57. Shaviro, Universe of Things, 61. 58. Cited from an unedited manuscript, in Kurath and Kuhn, “‘pācient(e)’ 2d.” 59. Ethan Kleinberg, “#AHA2015 #s214 BK: ‘Whenever I Hear a Student Say That Objects Have Agency I Say That I Have a Bridge Who Wants to Sell Itself to Them.,’” @ekleinberg (blog), January 4, 2015, https://twitter.com/ekleinberg/ status/551826354866757633. For those unfamiliar with academic conference tweeting protocol, the first acronym identifies the conference, the second the session, the third, the speaker, Ben Kafka, whose words Kleinberg here paraphrases. 60. Steward, “Animal Agency,” 226. 61. Pearson, “Dogs, History, and Agency,” 135. 62. Pearson, 129. 63. Ralf Stoeker, quoted in Pearson, “History and Animal Agencies,” 247. 64. Marx, “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 595; translation modified slightly. 65. Freud, Freud Reader, 577. 66. For an allied project of “infecting” hitherto “natural” categories, like love or voice, with a typically human malaise, see two works by Dominic Pettman: Human Error and Sonic Intimacy. 67. Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became Man, 2.5, 150. 68. Badiou, Saint Paul, 4. 69. Connolly, Fragility of Things, 75. 70. Vuillemin-­Diem, ed., Metaphysica, Lib. I-­XIV, section 7. 71. Metaphysics commentary book 7, lesson 6; Latin available online through the Dominican House of Studies: Priory of the Immaculate Conception, http:// dhspriory.org. 72. Physics commentary, book 2, lesson 9. Latin available online at the Dominican House of Studies: Priory of the Immaculate Conception, http://dhspriory .org. 73. Cited in van der Lugt, Le ver, 134. 74. Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy; and, further back, B. Davies, “Concept of Agency,” 42–­53, both cited hundreds of times, although rarely or never by the main line of speculative realists.

Notes to Chapter 5    203 75. Abrams, “From Autonomy to Agency,” 825. For representative discussions of agency in black feminism, briefly, see Russell, “Black American Sexuality,” 216–­17, which draws on Collins and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s foundational work on intersectionality to observe that in the context of American racism, black heterosexual women can rebel by following normative marriage scripts that were, however, never intended by the white dominant culture for black people—­that is, what looks like submission in one context can be agential in another. At length, see Davidson, Black Women. 76. Abrams, “From Autonomy to Agency,” 825. 77. Irigaray, This Sex, 31. 78. Dolphijn and Tuin, “Interview with Karen Barad,” 54. 79. Despret, “From Secret Agents to Interagency,” 44. 80. W. Johnson, “On Agency,” 113–­24, and “To Remake the World.” 81. Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 135. 82. Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” 12: “Reinsten . . . der entweder gar keins, oder ein unendliches Bewußtsein hat, d. h. in dem Gliedermann, oder in dem Gott.” 83. Tolstoy, War and Peace, 709. 84. Wit Newly Revived, 22. 85. C. Williamson, Old English Riddles, 110. The damage to the manuscript offers several possible reconstructions of the riddle’s final lines; compare Williamson to, for example, Tupper, Riddles of the Exeter Book, 52–­53: “iteð unsodene ea . . .” Recent extended treatments of the riddles as a whole include Bitterli, Say What I Am Called; and P. Murphy, Unriddling the Exeter Riddles. Neither has much to say about this particular poem. For a brief and lively treatment of the Exeter Book and its medieval career, among other things, as a cutting board and occasional table, see C. Williamson, Complete Old English Poems, 299–­302. 86. Translation primarily from Mackie, Exeter Book, 215, modified with reference to Baum, Anglo-­Saxon Riddles, 27. Generally, critics have thought the oyster either ridiculous or have rescued it into some sober human moral or historical meaning: see Salvador, “Oyster and the Crab,” 400–­419 (a critique of gluttony during a period of Benedictine dietary reform); McFadden, “Raiding, Reform, and Reaction,” 329–­51 (brief reference amid a historicist interpretation on violence and anxiety); and Bellamy, Dire Straits, 16 (the oyster is “comically buffeted”). The only treatment that considers the oyster as an oyster belongs to Estes, Anglo-Saxon Literary Landscapes. 87. Alaimo, “Violet-­Black,” 241–­42. 88. Irigaray, Elemental Passions, 69. 89. See Cavell, Weaving Words and Binding Bodies, 87. 90. Those seeking an origin of this ecological insight elsewhere than, in particular, Heidegger, might look instead to Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 11: “In

204    Notes to Chapter 5 truth, all concepts, even the philosophical ones, refer to nonconceptualities, because concepts on their part are moments of the reality that require their formation, primarily for the control of nature.” Here the notorious Ashton translation works, although his “control” might be rendered instead as “dominance”: “In Wahrheit gehen alle Begriffe, auch die philosophischen, auf Nichtbegriffliches, weil sie ihrerseits Momente der Realitat sind, die zu ihrer Bildung—­primar zu Zwecken der Naturbeherrschung—­notigt.” Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 21. Irigaray is of course also relevant. 91. One early translation, absolutely faithful in its treatment of the oyster episode, is Sauvage, La Circe. The two dramatic adaptations may be based on Gelli, or more directly on Plutarch, via “Que les bestes brutes,” 1:270–­74, which first made the text generally available in Western Europe (note, however, that the final entry in Machiavelli’s eight-­part satire of 1517, L’asino [The donkey], is also an adaptation of Gryllus). The two French plays each omit the oyster: The first, from 1661, is Montfleury, Les bestes raisonnables, 1:223–­38, which features one scene in which a man, once a lion, shouts in frustration (“Qui diable m’a rendu ma première figure!”) when returned for a while to its human form, and then in effect answers Wittgenstein’s observation (“If a lion could speak &c”) by railing at Ulysses about human cruelty and treachery. The next, from 1718, is Legrand and Fuzelier, Les animaux raisonnables,” 3:1–­35. Though lacking a talking oyster, the play does have a singing dolphin, which claims to be happy to meet Ulysses once more after vainly searching for him among “deux cens Huîtres” (two hundred oysters). The lion of Jean de la Fontaine’s fable “Les compagnons d’Ulysse” is one of several animals, none oysters, that refuse to become human again (here I am a king, it says; were I a human, I would once more be but a simple soldier). For guidance in finding this material, see Boas, Happy Beast, 35–­36, which is preceded by a detailed paraphrase of the Gelli; Connon, “Animal Instincts,” 75–­90 (which traces the route from Plutarch to the French adaptations); and Escola and Rabau, “Bibliothèque de Circé, which is particularly good on nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century reimaginings of Circe. 92. Yarnall, Transformations of Circe, 110–­11. 93. For the deceit and storytelling of Circe and the animals, see especially the reading of Plutarch in Warner, Monsters of Our Own Making, 272–­83. 94. Shannon, Accommodated Animal, 162. 95. Gelli, Circe, 13. 96. Gelli, 19. 97. Shannon, Accommodated Animal, 160. 98. Gelli, Circe, 19–­20. 99. Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am, 122, summarizing Lacan. 100. See Agamben, Open, 30, on Carl Linnaeus’s classification of humans as “manlike,” “constitutively nonhuman,” an “ironic” anthropological “machine”

Notes to Chapter 5    205 that preserves the supposedly fundamental human capacity to recreate itself as anything. 101. Gelli, Circe, 12. 102. From his 1622 Strange Newes, 11. 103. In my attention to voice as an expression primarily of voicelessness, I distinguish my approach from the excellent study by Menely, Animal Claim. 104. Derrida, “L’animal,” 278, and Animal That Therefore I Am, 28. 105. Scarry, Body in Pain. 106. Nagel, “What Is It Like?,” 435–­50. 107. Agamben, Open, 47. For Agamben’s source, see Uexküll, Foray, 50–­52. 108. This is the summary of Grandin and Johnson, Animals in Translation from Fudge, “Milking Other Men’s Beasts,” 19. Fudge’s essay, which attends to humans and disability, as well as the history of the size and treatment of livestock, is an exceptionally good phenomenological/social–­historical engagement with animals. 109. Wolfe, “Exposures,” 21: “For Derrida . . . we never have an idea of what death is for us—­indeed, death is precisely that which can never be for us—­and if we did, then the ethical relation to the other would be immediately foreclosed.” 110. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 302–­3. 111. Perry, Religious Pieces in Prose and Verse, 22. 112. Colish, Stoic Tradition, 287: “In the Consolation, the chief objective of his refutation of fatalism is not to make way for contingency in general but to establish the reality of free will.” See also Sharples, “Fate, Prescience, and Free Will,” 216, on the “Iamblichus Principle,” in which “the nature of knowledge is determined by the nature of the knower rather than by the thing known.” 113. Chaucer’s translation of the Consolation renders the two words as “oistres”: Chaucer, “Boece,” 465. 114. Boethius, Consolation, 5.5. 115. Albert the Great, Aristotle’s “On Animals,” 4.5, 156. Thanks to Eliza Zingesser for this reference.

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Index

Aberth, John, 172n23 Abrams, Kathryn, 151 Absalom, 122 Abulafia, Abraham, 45 Abumrad, Jad, 188 Adagia (Erasmus), 120 Ad nationes (Tertullian), 44 Adorno, Theodor, 203n90 Aerts, Erik, 171n4 Afro-pessimism, 188n126 Against Jovinianus (Jerome), 118, 120–21, 197n41 Agamben, Giorgio, 56, 58, 60, 145–46, 159–60, 170n14, 184n78, 185n85, 201n44, 204n100, 205n107 Agathias Scholasticus of Myrina, 119, 196n38 agency, 13, 101, 105, 107, 138–39, 145– 53, 158–60, 163–64, 203n75. See also autonomy Agobard of Lyon, 44 Ahmed, Sara, 14, 27–28, 37, 70 Ailbe, 54–55 Airt, Cormac Maic, 54 Aitchison, Briony, 174n46 Akbarnama (Abū al-Faz̤l), 46. See also Akbar the Great Akbar the Great, 46–48, 50–52, 180nn24–25, 180n37, 181n38

Alaimo, Stacy, 153–54 Albert the Great, 4, 64, 72, 97, 100, 102, 164, 169n11 Alcuin of York, 42 Alexander the Great, 113, 117–18, 131, 178n13 Ali Flekk, 54, 169n8 Allen, Valerie, 68 “Als I lay in winteris nyt,” 106 Amala and Kamala, 63 Anaxagoras, 68 anchoresses, 17–18, 171n3 Ancrene Riwle, 17–18, 33, 171nn2–3 Angelomus of Luxeuil, 178n9 animals. See specific types animaux raisonnables, Les (Legrand and Fuzelier), 204n91 anthropophagy, 14, 38, 72, 198n1 anti-Semitism, 38–39, 67, 113, 129, 131, 146, 177n96, 178n13, 187n110 apes, 47 Apophtegmatum ex optimis utriusque linguae scriptoribus (Lykosthenes), 196n23 Aquinas, Thomas, 3, 25–27, 32, 174n53, 200n17, 202nn71–72 Arcana Microcosmi, or The Hid Secrets of Man’s Body Discovered (Ross), 186n96 247

248   Index Aristotle, 96–97, 102–3, 140, 144, 150, 164 Arius, 76 Aroles, Serge, 185n95 Arthur and Gorlagon, 2. See also werewolves Augustine of Hippo, 3–4, 28, 42, 98, 101, 111–12, 169n6, 175n65, 177n1, 177n4 Ausonius, 199n2. See also oysters automatism, 4, 137, 150, 160. See also instinct autonomy, 62, 148, 151 Avicenna, 32 Awntyrs off Arthur, 76 baboons, 72 bacteria, 76, 95 Bada’uni, 46, 48 Badiou, Alain, 150 Bale, Anthony, 176n90, 177n98 Bambach, Charles, 198n61 Barad, Judith, 174n44 Barad, Karen, 148, 151 Barker, Jessica, 191n33 Basil of Caesarea, 96, 98, 171n10 Bataille, Georges, 107 Bauman, H-Dirksen, 181n48 Baynton, Douglas C., 181n48 bears, 2, 5, 21, 59, 140, 173n39 Bede, 42, 177n1, 178n8 Bekoff, Marc, 199n7 Bellamy, Elizabeth Jane, 203n86 Benardete, Seth, 180n38 Benedictus Levita, 195n9 Bennett, Jane, 95, 148 Bentham, Jeremy, 14, 89, 159 Benzaquén, Adriana Silva, 186n103 bestes raisonnables, Les (Montfleury), 204n91 bestiaries, 141, 200n24, 201n32

Bianchi, Emanuela, 192n62 Bible: Exodus, 53, 101, 182n51; Genesis, 7–8, 41–42, 100–101, 128, 169n8, 177n2, 193n69; Luke, 29; 1 Corinthians, 75; Proverbs, 108; Psalms, 8, 93, 171n2; 2 Kings, 112 Biclarel, 4, 169n8 Biernoff, Suzannah, 190n22 Binois, Annelise, 172n24 bipedality, 68–69, 187n112 birds, 21, 42–43, 59, 79, 83, 114, 117–18, 122, 180n36; charadrios/stonecurlew, 143, 201n32; chickens, 18, 27; crows, 127; eagles, 59, 123, 132, 184n81; falcons, 83–84; gulls, 133; hawks, 24; parrots, 47; vultures, 122, 127. See also sky burial Bisclavret (Marie de France), 1–5, 8, 9, 13–15, 58, 60, 170n21, 185n85 Bitterli, Dieter, 203n85 Blaise of Parma, 103, 193n82, 194n84, 194n86 Blud, Victoria, 170n14 Blurton, Heather, and Hannah Johnson, 175n66, 177n97 boars, 26, 90 Boas, George, 204n91 Bobis, Laurence, 171n8, 172n17 Boece. See Chaucer, Geoffrey Boethius, 141, 145, 162–63, 192n56, 200n21 Bonvillian, John D., 180n38 Book of Curtesye (Caxton), 176n82 Book of John Mandeville, 114, 131–33, 178n13, 198n75, 199n77 Book of Nature (Konrad of Magenberg), 64 Book of the Game of Chess (Caxton), 122

Index    249 Book of the Knight of La Tour-Landry (Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry), 176n78 Book of the Laws of Various Countries (Bardesanes or Bar Dayṣān), 118 Boret, Sébastien Penmellen, 195n15 Borst, Arno, 180n38 Botelho, Keith M., 192nn48–49 Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke, 187n112 Brantley, Jessica, 189n19, 194n95 Brault, Pascale-Anne, 174n51 Bray, Abigail, and Claire Colebrook, 194n92 Brennan, Summer, 199n2 Brevis commentatio de proprietate nominum (Ludwig), 180n35 brotherhoods, 54–56, 61–62, 182n56 Brown, Laura, 20, 172n19 Brown, Peter, 195n2 Bruns, Gerald L., 191n37 Buddhists, 123–25, 129–33. See also sky burial Burdukiewicz, Jan Michel, 195n1 burial, 77–79, 85–88, 111–20, 122, 126–31, 165, 194n1. See also sky burial Butler, Judith, 28–29, 39, 62, 135, 151, 177n101, 188n126 Butterfield, Ardis, 175n23 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 115, 189n19 Byzantines, 118–19 cadaver monument. See transi tomb Cadoc, 173n37 Campana, Joseph, 192n49 Campbell, Emma, 170n14 Campbell, Mary Blaine, 192n49 Campbell, Nathan, 178n10 Campi, Édith, 182n56 Candland, Douglas K., 186n103

Canis legend, 9, 23–26, 29–30, 173n39, 174n56. See also Seven Sages of Rome cannibalism. See anthropophagy Canterbury Tales. See Chaucer, Geoffrey carcass, 100 care ethics, 50, 59, 61 Carroll, Lewis, 153, 158 Carroll, Michael P., 186n96 Carthusians, 79, 81, 83, 190n28 Çatal-höyük, 115 Cathasaigh, Tomás Ó., 183n59 cats, 17–23, 63, 89–90, 137–38, 159, 171n4, 172n13, 172n17, 174n57, 191n42 Cavell, Megan, 192n56, 203n89 Cavendish, William, 136–37, 160 Cave of Treasures, 42 Celtchar, 26 Cerquiglini-Toulet, Jacqueline, 189n12 Chang, Chia-Ju, and Iris Ralph, 176n91 Chaucer, Geoffrey: Boece, 205n113; Canterbury Tales fragments, 174n60; Clerk’s Tale, 34; Knight’s Tale, 34; Parson’s Tale, 38; Prioress’s Portrait, 30–40; Prioress’s Tale, 38; Tale of Melibee, 175n65 Chen, Mel, 147, 202n49 children, 23–24, 29, 32, 34, 41, 43–56, 59–68, 70–71, 90, 97, 146–47, 179n25, 180n38, 185nn96–97, 186n103 Christ. See Jesus Christina the Astonishing, 9 “Chronicle of the Thuringian Benedictine Monastery of Peter of Erfurt,” 65–72 Chrysostom, John, 197n42 Cicero, 44, 54, 118

250   Index Circe, La: Gelli, 155–57, 204n91, 204n93; Sauvage, 204n91 Clark, David L., 191n46 Clark, Mark J., 197n46 Clouds, The (Aristophanes), 44 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 3, 148 Cohen, Jeremy, 198n73 Cohen, Kathleen, 189n19 Colish, Marcia L., 205n112 Commentary on Plato’s Gorgias (Olympiodorus the Younger of Alexandria), 201n32 community, 39–40, 41, 69–73, 111, 114, 133 “compagnons d’Ulysse, Les” (Fontaine), 204n91 Compound of Alchemy, 148 Condren, Edward L., 175n69 Connolly, William E., 150 Connon, Derek, 204n91 Cooper, Helen, 175n72 corpses, 65, 78, 80–82, 85, 87–88, 94, 109, 111–33, 189n15, 191n33, 194n97, 196n23 Cottin-Bizonne, Sharron Hoggs, 200n24 cows, 17, 59, 98, 100, 156, 160 Cox, Christopher, 199n4 crab, 157–58, 203 Crane, Susan, 39, 167, 169n11, 170n13, 172n18 Crass, 176n89 Creamer, Paul, 170n14 Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, 203n75 Cur deus homo (Anselm of Canterbury), 149–50 Cure for Pagan Maladies, A (Theo­ doret of Cyrus), 118, 196n31 cyclops, 67 cynocephali, 54 Cyrus of Persia, 53, 55, 59

Dabestan-e mazaheb (Mobad Shah), 46 dakhma, 117. See also sky burial Danesi, Marcel, 180n38 Daniell, Christopher, 195n2 Davidson, Maria del Guadalupe, 203n75 Davies, Bronwyn, 202n74 Davies, Jon, 196n22 Davis, Kathleen, 170n30 Davis, Lisa Fagin, 197n52 Davis, Michael, 180n38 deafness, 44, 46, 50–52, 180n34, 181n48 death, 3, 15, 28–29, 58, 62, 71–72, 75–79, 85, 87–88, 94, 106–10, 112, 116, 125, 128–29, 133, 142, 144–45, 159–60, 198n63 Death of Ulster Heroes, 26 De causis diversitatis linguarum (Borch), 180n35, 180n37 decay, 65, 73, 79–80, 87, 97, 100–101, 106, 108, 117, 129, 190n32, 201n30 deer, 21, 59, 156 Defensor pacis (Marsilius of Padua), 4 De Jong, Albert, 196n22 Dekkers, Midas, 190n20 demons, 101 De natura populorum (Besold), 180n34 De rerum proprietatibus (Bartholomew the Englishman), 68, 97 Derrida, Jacques, 14–15, 28, 56, 69, 78, 89–90, 138, 152, 159, 184n78, 185n83, 191n42, 191n46, 199n80, 200n18, 204n99, 205n109 Descartes, René, 5–8, 13, 136–39, 145, 160–61 Description of Greece (Pausanias), 173n37, 184n81 Despret, Vinciane, 3, 138, 147–48, 151

Index    251 Dialogus miraculorum (Caesarius of Heisterbach), 65, 78, 187n105 Diderot, Denis, 144, 194n93 Dīn-i Ilāhī, 47 Diogenes the Cynic, 116, 196n23 Discours et histoires des spectres (Le Loyer), 187n108 “Disputation between the Body and the Worms,” 79–96, 106–10 DNA and RNA, 104 Dodds, Susan, 185n87 dogs, 1, 5–7, 9, 18, 21, 23–40, 53–55, 57–58, 63–65, 88, 90–91, 111, 113–18, 140, 156, 172n24, 173n39, 174n41, 175n60, 175n67, 182n51, 182n56, 183n64, 187n105, 191n46, 196n23 dolphins, 204n91 donkeys, 204n91 Donovan, Josephine, 185n90 dormice, 26–27 Doughty, Caitlin, 198n63 Douthwaite, Julia, 186n103 dragons, 8, 90 “Driven from the Seas, or The Pirate Dredger’s Doom” (Duncan), 199n2 Duke Ernst, 67 Dumézil, Georges, 55, 182n56, 184n68 Dunn, Charles W., 185n96 Dyets Dry Dinner (Buttes), 200n19 earthworms, 148 eating, 37, 39, 71–73, 75–133, 136, 143, 153–55, 164 Eaton, R. D., 175n65, 175n73 Eco, Umberto, 179n26 ecocriticism, 73, 76–77, 85, 95–96, 107, 125–26, 138, 146, 155, 165, 197n59 eels, 98 Eichmann, Adolf, 191n32 Eiseley, Loren C., 5

Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, The (Roe), 180n32 Ephraem of Syria, 78 Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus (Justinus), 56, Ernoldus Nigellus, 171n8 Ernst, Carl W., 179n29 Erreurs populaires au fait de la méde­ cine (Joubert), 44, 178n17 “Erþe toc of erþe,” 77 Escola, Marc, and Sophie Rabau, 204n91 Esmail, Jennifer, 181n48 Esposito, Roberto, 177n101, 188n126 Essay on the Origin of Human Knowl­ edge, An (Condillac), 49 Estes, Heide, 203n86 Etruscan, 54, 182 Etymologies (Isidore of Seville), 20, 42, 96, 98, 200n24 Euclem, John, 193n82 Eudes of Rouen, 22, 173n31 Eusebius, 111, 117 Evans-Wentz, W. Y. See Tibet Ever-New Tongue. See Tenga Bithnua Evilmerodach, 121–23, 197n52 evolutionary psychology, 13, 185n93 Fabian, Johannes, 170n26 Fable of the Bees (Mandeville), 49 faciality, 45, 90–91, 93, 107, 138 Farley, John, 193nn76–77 Farrell, Thomas J., 175n76, 176n86, 177n102 Federici-Vescovini, Graziella, 193n83 feminism, 32–33, 37, 52, 59–61, 90, 150–51, 181n48, 185n87, 185n90, 190n20, 190nn22–23, 191n42, 203n75. See also agency; care ethics; misogyny

252   Index feral children, 62–73, 184n81, 185nn95–96, 186n103 Fernandez, Ingrid, 198n63 Ficino, Marsilio, 143–45 Fineman, Martha, 185n88 Finlayson, John, 175n74 Fishel, Stefanie, 192n58 Fissell, Mary, 192n63 Fleischman, Diana, 199n6 Fleming, Julia, 190n28 flesh, 39, 72–73, 77, 79–83, 106–7, 111–12, 117, 125, 132, 190nn22–23 Flint, Valerie, 174n47 Foehr-Janssens, Yasmina, 173n34 food, 1, 37, 39, 48, 64, 66–67, 71–72, 75–78, 80, 83, 91–95, 108–10, 113–33. See also anthropophagy; eating forest, 1, 58, 66–67 Fournié, Eléonore, 193n70 Fradenburg, Aranye, 170n33, 174n52 Fraiman, Susan, 191n37 Franciscans, 19, 45, 124 Freccero, Carla, 191n37, 191n42 Frederick II, 45, 48 Freud, Sigmund, 58, 68, 146–47, 149 friars, 21, 30–31, 123. See also Carthusians; Franciscans friendship, 25–28, 108–10, 174n43 Fudge, Erica, 191n37, 205n108 funerals, 111–19, 123–33 Fuss, Diana, 189n15 Garrard, Greg, 197n59 gazelles, 63, 72 Geisweidt, Edward J., 192n63 Geography (Strabo), 117 Georgiana, Linda, 171n3 Gerald of Wales, 1–2, 18, 91, 93, 113, 169n6 Gerstein, Mary R., 182n56, 184n66 gesture, 1–2, 50–52, 170n21

Gieson, Gerald L., 193n77 Gillis, John R., 199n1 Ginzburg, Carlo, 55, 183n63 goats, 44, 59, 63, 156, 179n27 Göbekli, 115 God, 7–8, 33, 42–43, 87, 91, 93, 98, 100–102, 105, 107, 112, 161–63, 177n2, 177n4, 181n48, 193n69, 194n84 Godfrey, Mary F., 177n97 Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 201n47 Gog and Magog, 131, 178n13 Golden Legend: Caxton, 19; Jacobus de Voragine, 18–19, 171n10 Gouin, Margaret, 197n53 Grandin, Temple, 160, 205n108 Gray, Douglas, 171n4, 189n19 Gregory the Great, 18–19 Griffin, Miranda, 169n9, 170n14 Grosseteste, Robert, 12, 174n53, 200n19 Grote, Geert, 172n17 Gruen, Lori, 185n90 Grumeza, Ion, 183n56 Gryllus (Plutarch), 155, 204n91 Guinefort. See Canis legend Guðmundsdóttir, Aðalheiður, 169n8 Hachet-Souplet, P., 200n14 Ha-Nakdan, Berechiah, 57, 184n73 Hantel, Max, 191n46 Haraway, Donna, 37, 73, 76, 90, 95, 188n32, 190n32 hares, 156, 169n6 Harman, Graham, 202n49 Harris, Henry, 193nn80–81, 201n27 Harrison, Matthew, 183n62 Hartle, Paul N., 176n85 Hashmi, Mobina, 195n18 Hauser, Kaspar, 64, 186n103 Haymo of Auxerre, 122

Index    253 Hayy ibn Yaqzan (Ibn Tufail), 49, 181n41 Hebrew, 42–43, 45–46, 50, 178n11, 178n13 hedgehogs, 9 Hegarty, Valerie, 127 Hegelian, 78, 154 Heidegger, Martin, 78, 125–26, 198n61, 203n90 Held, Virginia, 185n89 Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 144–45 Heng, Geraldine, 198n75 Hennessy, Marlene Villalobos, 189n19 hermits, 18–19, 21, 171n8 Herodotus, 43–48, 53–54, 59, 116–17, 180n34, 180n38 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 179n26 Higley, Sarah, 178n10 Hildegard of Bingen, 42–43, 178n10 Hillel of Verona, 45 Histoire generale de l’empire du Mogol depuis sa fondation (Catrou), 50–52 Historica relatio, de potentissimi regis Mogor (Peruschi), 46–47 Historie and Cronicles of Scotland (Lindsay), 45, 48, 51, 52–53 History of Rome (Livy), 53–54, 182n55 History of the Franks (Gregory of Tours), 119–20 History of the Lombards (Paul the Deacon), 54, 183n56, 197n42 History of the Wars (Procopius of Caesarea), 63, 118 Hodges, Laura, 175n76, 177n102 Höfler, Otto, 68, 183n63 Hollywood, Amy, 190n26 homo erectus topos. See bipedality Hostetter, Aaron, 175n64 Householder, Michael, 198n75 Huff, Dietrich, 196nn25–26 Hume, David, 135

Humphrey, Chris, 200n20 Hunting, 1, 21, 33, 48, 55, 58, 64, 67, 72, 172n17, 174n41, 184n77 Hurricane Sandy, 158, 199n3 Ia (Byzantine Saint), 118–19 Ibn Ezra, Abraham, 45 Idel, Moshe, 179n26 “In a þestri stude I stod,” 106 infants. See children inhumation. See burial In Ictu Oculi: Alfaro, 127; Leal, 198n64 insects, 91, 96–97, 102, 137 instinct, 4, 25, 32, 61, 137–38, 142, 147–50, 160. See also reason and rationality Introductio in Orientem (Pfeiffer), 180n34 Ireland, 1, 9, 20, 43, 48, 54, 56–57, 63 Irigaray, Luce, 151, 154, 204n90 Islam. See Muslims Isopes fabules (Lydgate), 57, 184 Jacques de Vitry, 65, 68, 187n111 Japan, 46–47, 115, 131 jellyfish, 143–44 Jesus, 3, 29, 34, 42, 76, 81, 83, 84, 106 Jews, 45, 50–51, 122, 174n41, 177n1, 177n6, 179n26, 184n73. See also anti-Semitism John of Plano Carpini, 124 Johnson, Joseph, 173n34, 174n56 Johnson, Phillip David, 192n48 Johnson, Walter, 203n80 John the Deacon, 18 Jones, Malcolm H., 171n4 Jonuks, Tõnno, and Marge Konsa, 195n16 Jordan, William Chester, 184n72 Jubilees, 42–43, 177n6

254   Index Judah the Pious, 169n8 Jungmannschaften. See brotherhoods Kafka, Ben, 202n59 Kahn, Richard V., 185n94 Kalash, 115 Kampling, Rainier, 171n8 Kawaguchi, Ekai, 198n66 Kelly, Henry Ansgar, 175n62 Kershaw, Priscilla K. (Kris), 182n56 Kessler, Eckhard, 193n82 Khanmohamadi, Shirin A., 129 Kidd, Kenneth B., 186n103 Kinch, Ashby, 189n7 King, Pamela M., 191n35 King’s Mirror, 9 Kittredge, George Lyman, 32 Kleinberg, Ethan, 202n59 Knoeff, Rina, 192n63 Kosut, Mary, 192n49 Kramer, Samuel Noah, 177n3 Kristeva, Julie, 189n20 Krulwich, Robert, 72 Kumler, Aden, 193n70 Kunziar, Alice, 174n52 Kurlansky, Mark, 199n2 Lacan, Jacques, 29, 62, 142–43, 194n92, 201n27, 204n99 Lane, Harlan, 181n48 L’asino, (Machiavelli), 204n91 Latour, Bruno, 148, 193n76 Lawee, Eric, 170n25 Lawn, Brian, 193n83 Lazcano, Antonio, 194n89 Lee, Jae Rhim, 129, 198n71 Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van, 102, 104, 193n80 Leicester, H. Marshall, 170n14 leopards, 59

Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians (Catlin), 195n15 Levinas, Emmanuel, 78, 90–91 Lewbart, Gregory A., 199n5 Lewis, Brian, 181n49 Lewis, Tyson, 185n94 Liber Confortatorius (Goscelin of St. Bertin), 18 Liber de vita et moribus philosopho­ rum (Walter of Burley), 196n23 life, 7, 15, 24, 27–29, 39, 69, 79, 96, 98, 100–105, 107–8, 141–46, 148, 194n91, 200n24, 201n43 Lim, Gary, 174n55 linguistic origins, 49–50. See also gesture Linnaeus, Carl, 204n100 lions, 57, 156, 184n73, 204n91 Liou-Gille, Bernadette, 183n64 Lipton, Sara, 171n4 Liščák, Vladimir, 197n53 Living Librarie, The (Camerarius), 187n103, 187n108 Lochrie, Karma, 176n85, 190n22 Lollards, 176n85 Louis of Bavaria, 187n108 Lugt, Maaike van der, 192n63, 193n82, 194n85 luparii, 58 Lupercalia, 183n64 Lusus Serius (Maier), 200n19 Luther, Martin, 194n86 MacInnes, Ian, 192n63, 194n99 Mackenzie, Catriona, 202n74 Maclagau, E. D., 180n33 Maddern, Phillipa, 194n97 Magdalene, Mary, 190n21 maggots. See worms

Index    255 Malaya, Oxana, 63 Malvern, Marjorie M., 189n19 Mandan, 114–15 Mann, Jill, 176n81 männerbünde. See brotherhoods Marazov, Ivan, 183n56 Marcuse, Herbert, 15 Marder, Michael, 141, 147 Marie de France, 1–5, 8–9, 13–14, 58, 60, 70, 170n21 Marvin, William Perry, 184n77 Marx, Karl, 4, 125, 202n64 masculinity, 24, 30, 60–61, 80–85, 107, 109–10 Massa-Pairault, Françoise-Hélène, 182n52 Matlock, Wendy A., 190n23, 194n97 Matthiessen, Peter, 128 Mbembe, Achille, 198n67 McCartney, Eugene, 186n96 McCone, Kim R., 57, 183n59, 184n69 McCracken, Peggy, 2, 60, 185n84, 186n102 McEvoy, James, 174n43 McFadden, Brian, 203n86 McGuire, Brian Patrick, 187n104 McLaughlin, Mary Martin, 179n25 Meale, Carol M., 176n81 meat, 21, 30, 37, 39, 70–73, 83–84, 96, 117, 176n83. See also anthropophagy Medieval Romance of Alexander (Jehan Wauquelin), 186n101 melancholia, 65, 186n103 Melion, 1–2, 56–57 Memmie le Blanc, Marie-Angélique, 64 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Port­Royal (Fontaine), 5–6 Menely, Tobias, 191n46, 205n103 Mentz, Steve, 170n26 Metzler, Irina, 186n99, 187n109

mice, 31 Mirror of Saint Edmund, 161 misogyny, 3–4, 11, 13, 24, 30, 32–33, 35–36, 55, 60, 80–85, 120, 170n14, 174n41, 176n91 Mitchell, J. Allen, 148 Mitford, Jessica, 198n63 Moi, Toril, 185n83 Moisà, Maria, 176n77 molluscs. See oysters mongooses, 24, 173n36 monkeys, 9, 21, 63, 137 monks, 31, 33, 64–65, 79, 81, 87, 114 Montgomery, Sy, 201n47 Moore, Lisa Jean, 192n49 Moriones. See wild men Morrison, Susan Signe, 148 Morton, Timothy, 192n57, 198n59 Moses, 53, 101 Mosley, Conny, 199n5 mothers, 2, 32, 41, 54–55, 59, 61, 63, 112, 117, 182n52 mourning, 28–30, 62, 116, 119, 124–25 Muehlberger, Ellen, 189n5 Mundy, Peter, 180n35 Muñoz, José Esteban, 35 Muntaḵẖabu-T­Tawārīḵẖ (Maluk Shah), 179n30 Munz, Eva, 187n103 Murphy, Eileen M., 172n24 Murphy, James Jerome, 179n21 Murphy, Patrick J., 203n86 Murray, Margaret, 183n63 Muslims, 38, 47, 49, 193n82 Mutual Aid (Kropotkin), 62 “My Lief Life That Livest in Wealth,” 87 Naas, Michael, 174n51 Nagel, Thomas, 205n106 Nagy, Kelsi, 192n48

256   Index Natural History (Pliny the Elder), 54, 141, 181n39, 187n116, 200n19, 200n23 Naumann, Nelly, 195n17 Nazis, 55, 91, 125, 184n63 Nelson, Maggie, 15 Nicolas de Clamages, 64 Nicolas of Amsterdam, 193n82 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 105 Nimrod, 42, 177n1 Noah, 98 Note Book of an English Opium-Eater (de Quincey), 75–76 Nothing Left to Take Away (Branch), 133 “Nou is mon hol and soint,” 106 nuns, 18–19, 22, 30–35, 38, 42–43, 175n62, 176nn80–81 Obadiah the Prophet of Guratam, 179n26 Observationes medicae (Tulp), 63–64, 186n97 octopuses, 147, 159, 199n5, 201n47 Odin, 56 Odoric of Pordenone, 123–24, 126, 131–32, 197n53 Oedipal conflicts, 55, 58 Oelze, Anselm, 170n15 Oliver, Kelly, 32 On Abstinence from Killing Animals (Porphyry), 117, 196n35 “On Cannibals” (Montaigne), 118 On the Confusion of Tongues (Philo of Alexandria), 177n1, 177n6 “On the Marionette Theatre” (Kleist), 152 Orator’s Education, The (Quintilian), 44, 179n19, 179n21 Orientalism, 197nn56–57, 198n66, 198n72

origin of life research, 104. See also life; spontaneous generation Ortalli, Gherardo, 187n108 Ortnit, 90 O’Shea, John M., 195n15 Otia imperialia (Gervase), 91 Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Sextus Empiricus), 118 owls, 185n81 oysters, 135–47, 149, 152–59, 163–64, 199nn2–7, 200nn14–15, 200n19, 200n24, 203n86, 204n91, 205n113 Pangur Bán, 172n17 Paradise Lost (Milton), 75–76 Paralipomena (Sennert), 47 Pasteur, Louis, 101–2 Patterson, Lee, 176n88 Paulinus of Nola, 111, 199n2 Pearse, Roger, 179n24 Pearson, Chris, 202n61 Pearson, Roger, 182n56 pèlerinage de l’âme, Le (Guillaume de Deguileville), 106 Pensées (Montesquieu), 49, 181n44 Perceforest, 2, 169n9 periodicity, 5–10, 13–14, 23–24, 131, 170n26, 170n30 Peter Comestor, 122, 182n51 Peter of Hanover, 186n103 Peterson, Jordan, 185n93 pets, 7, 17–40, 57, 172nn18–19, 172n26 Pettman, Dominic, 36 Philippe de Thaon, 141, 200n24 Phillips, Kim M., 129, 197n56, 198n72 Philosophia Libera (Cardoso), 180n36 Phrygians, 43 Piers Plowman (Langland), 176n80 pigs, 113–14, 155 plants, 101, 126, 136, 140–41, 147, 162 Plato, 69, 143–44, 201n32, 201n35

Index    257 Plessis, Roger de, 6–8 Pluskowski, Aleksander, 184n79 Pluta, Olaf, 193n82, 194n84 Plutarch, 117, 155, 196, 204n91, 204n93 Polish, Jessica, 191n42 Polychronicon, 139–40 Poole, Christopher, 171n4 Pouchet, Felix Archimede, 101 Price, Merrall Llewelyn, 175n70 Psamtik, 43–45, 48, 178n15, 180n38 Pseudodoxia epidemica (Browne), 186n86, 187n116, 190n20 Pseudo-Philo, 177n1 Puig de la Bellacasa, María, 185n90 Purchas His Pilgrimes (Purchas), 180n32 putrefaction. See decay queer theory, 35–37, 39, 82, 181n48, 190n25, 191n32, 192n62 Quis dives salvetur (Clement of Alexandria), 44 Raber, Karen, 192n63 race and racialization, 37, 182n56, 185n87, 188n125, 203n75. See also anti-Semitism Racine, Félix, 179n18, 182n53 Radiolab, 72 Ransome, Hilda M., 192n50 Rashi, 7–8 Raskolnikov, Masha, 82–83, 189n17, 190n20 Raulin-Cerceau, F., 194 Raymo, Robert, 175 reason and rationality, 2–7, 10, 14–15, 25, 49, 52, 61, 65, 68–69, 89, 102–3, 117, 135, 137, 140, 145, 155–56, 158–59, 161–63, 170n15, 193n82. See also automatism; instinct

Recognitions (Pseudo-Clementine), 118 Regan, Tom, 5 Remigius of Auxerre, 178n9 Resnick, Irven M., 177n5, 178n11 Rex, Richard, 177n96 Richards, Emily, 189n16 Rickels, Laurence A., 28 Ritter, Erika, 173n34 Ritvo, Harriet, 20 Robertson, Elizabeth, 84, 190n23, 194n97 Rodriguez-Mayorgas, Ana, 184n75 Roe, Shirley A., 193n76 Roll-Hansen, Nils, 193n76 Roman de la Rose, 31 Roman de Toute Chevalerie, Le (Thomas of Kent), 113 Rooney, Kenneth, 189n7, 192n54 Rose, Paula J., 195n3 Rosenberg, Gabriel, 176n83 Ross, Estelle, 173n39 Ross, Kristin, 185n92 Rothwell, William, 175n63 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 61 Rudd, Gillian, 77–78 Rudy, Kathy, 37 Ruestow, Edward G., 193n80 Russell, Camisha, 203n75 Ruti, Mari, 39, 176n84 Ryboth. See Tibet saints, 9, 19, 23, 26–27, 54–55, 80, 111, 118–19, 123, 172n17, 173n37, 183n60 Salimbene de Adam, 19, 45, 48, 172, 179, 181 Salvador, Mercedes, 203n86 Sanchez, Rebecca, 181n48 Sand, Alexa, 175n60 Sandford, Stella, 192n63 Sargon, 53–54, 181

258   Index Saxon Mirror, 21, 172n26 Scarry, Elaine, 205n105 Schalow, Frank, 197n59 Schiesari, Juliana, 20, 172 Schmitt, Carl, 184n78 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 173n34 Schroeder, Leopold von, 182n56 Schultz, James, 190n25 Schummer, Joachim, 194n89 Sconduto, Leslie, 169n2 Scott, Walter, 179n27 Scythians, 54, 116–18, 183n56 Semiramis, 59 Serpell, James, 20–21 serpents, 24, 43, 101, 169n8 Serres, Michel, 125–26, 192n53 Seven Sages of Rome, 23–24, 173n32, 173n35, 173n39, 174n41 Shannon, Laurie, 156–57, 199n11 Sharples, Robert, 205n112 Shaviro, Steven, 148 sheep, 57, 63, 70, 179n27 Sherman, Phillip Michael, 177n1 Shotwell, Alexis, 189n6 Shyovitz, David I., 169n8 Siege of Jerusalem, The, 38 sign language. See deafness Silva de varia lección (Mexía), 44–45, 178n16, 179n17 Simmons, Laurence, 191n37 Simons, R. D., 175n62, 175n71, 176n86 Sindbad-Namah, 24 Singer, Peter, 136, 138–39, 199n4 Sir Eglamour, 26 Sir Gowther, 38, 175n64 sky burial, 114–19, 123–33 “Sky Burial,” 128 Smith, Justine E. H., 192n61 Smuts, Barbara, 72 snails, 97 snakes, 78, 85, 91, 156, 191n46

Sneddon, Lynne, 199n5 Songe d’Enfer (Raoul de Houdenc), 75, 188 soul, 3, 10, 27, 44, 48, 79, 88, 96, 103, 105–7, 112, 136–37, 140, 160, 162–64, 193n82, 194n84, 194n97 sovereignty, 2–3, 48, 52–53, 56–62 Spector, Stephen, 175n70 Speculum Historiale (Vincent of Beauvais), 120, 197n42 Speculum humanae salvationis, 122–23 Speer, Mary, 173n34 spiders, 4, 90 Spiedel, Michael P., 182n56 spontaneous generation, 49, 96–105, 141, 192n63, 193n76, 193n82, 194n84 squirrels, 21–22, 172n27, 173n31 Ssebunya, John, 63 Stasanor, 118, 196n35 Stavrianeas, Stasinos, 192n61 Steadman, John M., 175n62 Steeves, H. Peter, 186n103, 187n112, 188n124 Stevens, Benjamin Eldon, 181n38 Steward, Helen, 202n60 Stobaeus, Joannes, 196n23 Stoljar, Natalie, 202n74 Storia do Mogor, or Mogul India (Manucci), 50 Stott, Rebecca, 199n2, 200n15 Strange Newes out of Divers Countries (Breton), 157 Strengleikar, 4, 170n21 Strivay, Lucienne, 186n103 Surdus loquens (Amman), 181n48 Swammerdam, Jan, 102, 104 Synkellos, George, 177n6 Tales of Sendebar, 174n41 Tarnopolsky, Christina H., 201n33

Index    259 Taunton, Gwendolyn, 182n56 Taylor, Daniel J., 179n19 Tenga Bithnua, 43 Tennant, P. M. W., 182n52 Terrell, Katherine H., 194n97 Testart, Alain, 195n20 Thacker, Eugene, 192n58, 194n91 Theologus Autodidactus (Ibn al-Nafīs), 49, 181n41 Theosophism, 127 Thill, Brian, 198n70 Thomas, Keith, 20 Thomas, Margaret, 178n15 Thomas, Richard, 171n4, 172n18 Thomas of Cantilupe, 26–27 Thomas of Cantimpré, 9, 113–14 Tibet, 115, 123–24, 127–29, 131–32, 197n53, 198n66 Tiódéls Saga, 4 toads, 85, 91–94, 103, 124 Tower of Babel, 41–43, 177n1, 180n38 transi tombs, 85–88, 191n33, 191n35 Trawny, Peter, 198n61 Treffort, Cécile, 195n8 Tristan de Nanteuil, 64 Tristram, Philippa, 189n19 True Intellectual System of the Uni­ verse, The (Cudworth), 102, 193 Tyler, Tom, 198n59 Uexküll, Jakob von, 159, 205n107 Ulysses, 155–57, 204n91 Valentin and Orson, 64 van der Horst, Pieter, 177n1 van der Toorn, Karel, 177n1 vermin, 76, 79–81, 83, 85, 87–88, 90–91, 93–98, 100, 103, 105, 108–9, 114, 192n56, 192n63. See also worms

Vespasian, 76 Viridiana (Buñuel), 127 Volsung Saga, 56 Walker-Meikle, Kathleen, 172n23, 172n27 Walsh, Robb, 199n2 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 152 Warner, Marina, 204n93 Weemes, John, 200n17 Weiser, Lily, 55 Wennersten, John R., 199n2 werewolves, 1–2, 13–15, 54, 58, 169n2, 169n6, 169n8 White, David Gordon, 182n56 Why I Can’t Be a Nun, 34, 176n80 wild men, 64–65, 186nn101–2 William of Palerne, 2 William of Rubruck, 124 Williams, Raymond, 9 Williamson, Craig, 203n85 Williamson, Joan B., 186n102 Wiseman, Timothy Peter, 182n52 Wit Newly Revived, 203n84 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 204n91 Wolf Child of Hesse. See “Chronicle of the Thuringian Benedictine Monastery of Peter of Erfurt” Wolfdietrich, 54 Wolfe, Cary, 197n59, 201n43, 201n47, 205n109 wolves, 1–3, 5, 13–15, 21, 24, 41, 53–60, 62–63, 65–73, 113, 115, 169n8, 173n37, 182n52, 182n56, 183n64, 184n79, 185n81, 186n96, 187n108, 187n116. See also werewolves Wood, Chauncey, 175n74 Woodard, Ben, 201n30 Woolf, Rosemary, 189n19 worms, 77–80, 83, 85, 87–88, 93–98, 107–10

260   Index Xavier, Jerome, 47, 180nn33–34 Yarnall, Judith, 204n92 Yousef, Nancy, 61, 186n103 Yvain (Chrétien de Troyes), 64 Zahlten, Johannes, 193n70 Zerahyah ben Isaac ben Shealtiel Hen, 45

Zhender, Raphael, 186n98 Zingesser, Eliza, 205n115 Žižek, Slavoj, 36, 176n91, 184n80, 197n59, 201n29 Zoroastrianism, 116–20, 123 Zylinska, Joanna, 88, 188

K A R L S T E E L is associate professor of English at Brooklyn College

and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.